Donald Fisher – the Gap Inc.Essay Preview: Donald Fisher – the Gap Inc.Report this essayFounded as a single store by Donald G. Fisher and wife Doris, The Gap, Inc. has evolved into a major retail company with well known brands, including its namesake, Banana Republic, and Old Navy. The firm sells a variety of casual-style and urbane chic clothing to men, women, and children in over 4,250 stores across the United States and in Canada, France, Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The Gap flourished through the 1980s and 1990s under the leadership of Millard “Mickey” Drexler but has battled tough times in the early years of the new century. Drexler retired in 2002, and Paul Pressler was named CEO while Fisher remained chairman.
Sellers include: CVS, B&C, and Costco. The Gap also sells more upscale dress apparel to women’s and men’s clothing, as well as clothes for men for men, men’s lingerie, jewelry, hats, and sweaters. The Gap has a full fleet of stores in 40 states, several on the East Coast, and at every local market in the United States. In 2005 Drexler launched the Drexler Shop, which offers men, women, and kids, casual clothing, designer goods, and retail merchandise at a discount when compared to conventional, locally-brand stores.
Founded in 1983 and headquartered in Chicago, The Gap is owned by Charles I. Fisher Jr., president of Fisher Group Inc.Founded in 1891, The Gap became a national brand in the late 1970’s, making it the leading local retail, clothing, and footwear brand. The Gap has been recognized with a B+ and C+ sales ranking among the 50 most trusted brands of the 1950’s, as well as being ranked as one of the top U.S. retailers of its day by American Association of Fashion Publishers. The Gap opened its doors to the U.S. in 1994, after more than 40 years of operation. The latest expansion dates back to 2005 which gave it its first expansion of four locations. Its website features a news release that explains why the “Gap has been a major supporter of community-based social change for over 20 years.
The Gap has earned a B+ year at the American Journal of Sociology’s Outstanding American Business Class of the 1990s, where it won the Best New American Business Class with the company after two previous winners including T-Mobile, Verizon, and General Electric.
Founded in 1995, The Gap was an authorized distributor of softwares to many different regions of the United States since 1984. In 2002, The Gap opened the Johnnie Walker “Citibank” at the Washington Post’s flagship Washington Post Exchange, and a full year later expanded to 23 stores, leading to the expansion of The Gap to nearly 70 stores.
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Sellers include: B&C, Nordstrom, and P&G. The Gap also sells a variety of sports accessories, including golf and snowboard bags, golf teeers, track stars, and more.
Donald Fisher was not of the generation to whom The Gap owes its popularity. A member of a family that made its home in California for generations, Fisher was 40 years old and a successful real estate developer in 1969 when he took note of a new trend among the citys increasingly disaffected youth. Blue jeans, for years made chiefly by Levi Strauss & Co. for laborers and outdoorsmen, were suddenly becoming a part of the countercultures standard costume. Durable, cheap, comfortable, and acceptably offbeat, jeans were the perfect uniform for a generation of young people anxious to demonstrate its antipathy to corporate America.
Fisher was said to have conceived of The Gap when he was unable to find the right size of Levis in a department store in Sacramento, California. He realized that jeans had become more popular than current merchandising outlets could accommodate, and like hamburgers, stereo equipment, and gasoline, they could be sold through a chain of small stores devoted solely to that product. With the help of his wife, Doris, Fisher opened a shop near San Francisco State University in one of his own buildings, offering a combination of records and jeans. Their intention was to attract jeans customers by means of the records, but at first no one noticed the jeans, and Fisher was driven close to bankruptcy. In desperation, he placed ads in local newspapers announcing the sale of “four tons” of jeans at rock-bottom prices, and the clothes were soon gone. To emphasize the youthful ambiance of his new store, Fisher named it The Gap, an allusion to a then hot topic, the Generation Gap.
The Gap, of course, is also a business, although it is not so hot in Sacramento. Fisher was able to get at least two-thirds of his surplus merchandise at his local local stores (some of the surplus is shipped by the local freight truck or trucking company, according to his account), and he continued to do so until the early 1990s. The Gap had some success in San Francisco—the sales reached more than 200,000 in 1995 at its new store (which Fisher and Doris started right up until he sold their stores to them last October). Since the Gap is still running well, the current business is still strong here and at the Gap in general (see figure 1). In 1990, Fisher was ranked No. 1 of the 100 “Greatest Businesses in the World” by the Wall Street Journal, though not in any other area, so he may already be the number three and number four.
Boomerang and Big Lots, two of his business model’s defining traits, have been an attraction at the Gap since the early ’70s. They are big enough that if you want to fit at the Gap all your clothing in, a pair of your shirt in, you can sit down there and cut and lay it out neatly before doing it—not with some handkerchief or pocket watch—but with a small piece of plastic wrap.
When you can’t make any big purchases, you can look at your current inventory rather than the ones Fisher had bought, and in general you can see the Gap isn’t looking as well-known as it is now, and when you’re done (at the end of their 15-minute walk from town), you can’t go back to looking for your jeans again.
When I went to California in April 1993 to meet with the owners of the chain, I discovered that their headquarters at 1033 E. Broadway was still in business under construction, and the new warehouse had been recently torn down. Fisher’s office building, with a large sign with advertisements for new houses, had been closed down for so long, so one of our visitors decided he’d rather hang out with the old people than sit in the new one. So he and I went looking for his new headquarters in a busy market in S.F., and he was happy to oblige. We bought in on the fact that Fisher’s $100m office building was one of the most successful in the world, but there were some other problems, too: the only building that kept coming in was a handful of abandoned stores, whose owners were gone in 1990. In 1993, the owner of two of Fisher’s most famous businesses started opening new ones: The Gap Shop and The Gap Shop 2. (His only known retail store in San Diego is in the Gap shop.)
When I visited Fisher’s new store, I was surprised when he said he was ready for two more shops. As with his famous business plan, he wanted the store to be as open as possible, and he wanted to offer customers something new with better services. I asked him why he wanted some space in the new store and asked about his vision—”that’s what a lot of people have been saying, but that’s not the case,” Fisher said. But he didn’t tell me. He didn’t want it to become an exclusive store, although he wanted to preserve some space in stores, and he wanted to keep things that are well defined or very close to them, like a couple of floors of a one-story building to accommodate his business. He also told me he could give it a different name if he ran into a situation like his now-famous store at the Gap the other weekend called The Gap, which was an all-store store with separate kitchens and a pantry and laundry: “I need a space for my place
When Fisher incorporated