Levis
If Levi Strauss had stayed home, chances are we’d all be wearing corduroy and that whoosh-whoosh noise would have driven us mad years ago.
Fortunately the inventor of the modern blue jeans, born Loeb Strauss in Bavaria in 1829, was never a man to sit still. Along with his mother and two sisters, Strauss sailed for the new world in 1847 and quickly went to work in his half-brothers’ dry goods business in New York City.
Within a few years, Loeb had changed his first name to Levi, become an American citizen, and set out for San Francisco to bring the family dry goods business to the West Coast, then blossoming as a market in the heady days of the Gold Rush.
For the next twenty years, Levi sold blankets, pillows, clothing and the like all over the western U.S., and gained a reputation for honest goods and business practices. Much of the work clothing he sold was made of denim (from “serge de Nimes,” serge cloth from the town of Nimes in France), a rugged and durable cotton fabric popular among miners. (Denim pants were also known as “jeans,” due to a bit of popular confusion with “jean” cloth, a less durable cotton/wool blend named for Genoa, Italy.)
In 1872, Strauss received a letter from a Nevada tailor named Jacob Davis, who explained that he had come up with a way to strengthen the only weak points found in the denim pants he made. By adding metal rivets at stress points such as the pockets, Davis had eliminated the eventual tears that annoyed his customers, and they were ecstatic. Davis wanted to patent his invention, but lacked the funds, and proposed a business partnership with Strauss.
Levi Strauss agreed, and with the new invention and his marketing skills built the business that more than any other convinced Americans to adopt blue jeans as their national uniform.
Keds
If at first you don’t succeed, change a consonant. But be sure to pick the right consonant.
Back in the late 18th century, rubber-soled canvas shoes were becoming popular in both Europe and the U.S. Sure-footed, comfortable and nearly silent compared to leather-soled boots and shoes, rubber-soled footwear even gave us the slang term “gumshoe” from the gum-rubber soled shoes favored by detectives on the prowl for miscreants.
In 1892, nine small companies joined together to form the U.S. Rubber Company. One of the member companies, the oddly-named Goodyear Metallic Rubber Shoe Company, happened to hold the license to Charles Goodyear’s “vulcanization” process, a revolutionary technology of heat-bonding rubber to fabric that was far superior to the old-fashioned glue method.
Within a few years of their confederation, the constituent companies of U.S. Rubber were marketing rubber-soled shoes under a bewildering array of thirty different brand names, and by 1913 the need to agree on a single brand had become obvious.
The first choice for a brand name was the logical and catchy “Peds,” from the Latin “ped” meaning “foot.” Unfortunately, “Peds” was already trademarked by one of the few companies not part of U.S. Rubber, so management apparently then sang a few rounds of “The Name Song” (Pedda pedda fo fedda, me mi mo fedda…), trying out new initial consonants. After exhausting all 25 permutations of “Keds,” two candidates remained by 1916: “Veds” and “Keds.” The choice between the wispy and vaguely creepy “Veds” and the hard-consonant All-American “Keds” was a no-brainer, and soon kids were skinning their knees in Keds sneakers all over the U.S. More fashionable and fancier rubber-soled shoes may have grabbed the spotlight since then, but Keds, now manufactured by The Stride Rite Corporation, keep ticking along.
Abercrombie & Fitch
Known today for selling upscale youth clothing (as well as for its catalog, which until recently was frequently denounced for its sexually suggestive photographs), Abercrombie & Fitch is actually one of the oldest retail chains in the US. Today’s A&F, however, is a far cry from your granddaddy’s favorite sporting goods store.
Abercrombie & Fitch was the creation of an odd, and ultimately unsustainable, partnership. David T. Abercrombie was, by the 1890s, a former miner, trapper and engineer who had established a small business in Manhattan manufacturing and selling camping, hunting and other outdoors equipment. Ezra Fitch was a successful lawyer and avid outdoor enthusiast, a passion that made him one of Abercrombie’s best customers. In 1900, after much cajoling, Fitch finally convinced Abercrombie to let him buy into the business, and in 1904 the name of the enterprise officially became Abercrombie & Fitch. By 1907, however, the honeymoon was definitely over, and irreconcilable differences over the future of the business led to the breakup of the partnership. Abercrombie resigned and went back to manufacturing camping equipment, but Fitch found new partners and A&F entered the period of its greatest success.
In 1917, Abercrombie & Fitch Co., which had been mailing out more than 50,000 catalogs per year, established a twelve-story sporting goods store in Manhattan, at that time the largest in the world. Abercrombie & Fitch sold equipment and clothing for every conceivable sport or outdoor pastime, from big game hunting (Teddy Roosevelt was a customer) to lawn tennis.
By the 1960s, however, many Americans were getting all the adventure they wanted from television, and Abercrombie & Fitch foundered, finally declaring bankruptcy in 1977. After an unsuccessful reopening, again as a sporting goods chain, under new ownership, Abercrombie & Fitch was bought in 1988 by The Limited, which revamped A&F’s image and inventory. Gone were the shotguns and fishing lures, replaced by trendy clothing and racy imagery.