Samuel Colt was just a teenager when he came up with his first design for the revolver.

Fast forward almost 200 years and his company, Colt, is one of the most recognized names in the firearms industry.

Colt’s road to success, however, wasn’t smooth by any means. A recent report in Investor’s Business Daily takes a look at how Colt became an innovator in the industry and the struggles he went through to get there.

The report also documents Colt’s genius in developing his company.

“Colt was a genius at marketing and the first to use celebrity endorsements, often providing exquisitely engraved handguns and rifles to prominent people,” R.L. Wilson, co-author with Robert M. Lee of ‘The Art of the Gun: Magnificent Colts,’ told Investor’s Business Daily. “He was the first industrialist to use fine art as a sales tool, engaging artist George Caitlin to paint scenes in which his firearms saved lives, and distributed them as prints. He published illustrated pamphlets and had a magazine publish a 25-page story about his amazing factory. Colt even trademarked his signature and was the pioneer of global branding.”

Read the entire story about Colt’s incredible persistence and his company’s rise to the top on Investors.com.