A Boot That Survived Its Own Launch Ninety of the first hundred pairs L.L. Bean sold to out-of-state sportsmen in 1912 came back. The rubber bottoms had pulled away from the leather uppers, and Leon Leonwood Bean, in the first year of his mail-order business, refunded every buyer, corrected the construction and mailed …

A Letter Added for How It Looks on the Page The J in J.Crew is there for looks. The name was taken from the sport of crew, and a J was affixed to it for graphical appeal. It was a decision about how a word would sit on a catalog cover, made years before J.Crew opened its first store. Encyclopedia.com's company history …

A Star Grafted Onto a Century-Old Wordmark Sears kept the same corporate logotype in place for twenty-one years before retiring it in June 1984 — a swap UPI reported as straight business news the day it happened. That kind of coverage is itself a signal: a retailer's wordmark rarely makes the wire unless the retailer …

The Skyline That Wasn't Designed to Last Six jagged peaks rise out of the Patagonian steppe — not a smooth alpine arch, not a tidy triangle, but a genuinely ragged silhouette that reads as chaotic before it reads as beautiful. Above those peaks, the sky breaks into horizontal bands of blue, violet, and orange, the kind …

The Logo That Vanished Overnight On the morning of October 4, 2010, visitors to gap.com noticed something wrong. The familiar dark-blue square that had anchored the retailer's identity for two decades — white block-serif letters spelling GAP floating inside a solid navy field — had been replaced overnight by something …

A Typo That Became a Brand In the spring of 1963, a former Young & Rubicam copywriter named Gary Comer co-founded a mail-order yachting supply company in Chicago with partners Robert Halperin, Richard Stearns, and two of Stearns' colleagues. They intended to name the company after Land's End, the rocky headland at the …

A Signature, Not a Symbol In the winter of 1912, Leon Leonwood Bean came home from a hunting trip in Freeport, Maine, with cold, wet feet and an idea. He took a pair of rubber galoshes to a local cobbler and asked him to stitch leather uppers onto the rubber bottoms. The result was the Maine Hunting Shoe, and the …