The Larkin Company, also known as the Larkin Soap Company, was a company founded in 1875 in Buffalo, New York as a small soap factory. It grew tremendously throughout the late 1800s and into the first quarter of the 1900s with an approach called "The Larkin Idea" that transformed the company into a mail-order conglomerate that employed 4,000 people and had annual sales of $28.6 million (equivalent to $337,832,000 in 2015) in 1920. The company's success allowed them to hire Frank Lloyd Wright to design the iconic Larkin Administration Building which stood as a symbol of Larkin prosperity until the company's demise in the 1940s.