History
Founded in 1976 by Liz Claiborne, Art Ortenberg, Leonard Boxer, and Jerome Chazen. It was an immediate success with sales of $2 million in 1976 and $23 million in 1978. In 1980, Nina McLemore founded Liz Claiborne Accessories. Liz Claiborne Inc. went public in 1981 and had made the Fortune 500 in 1986, ten years after it was founded with retail sales of $1.2 billion. It was the first company founded by a woman to be listed in the Fortune 500.
Liz Claiborne was also the first designer to insist that her collection be placed together on the department store floor, instead of in separate clothing categories, which changed the way we shop. Shoppers no longer went from shirt department to pant department to coordinate an outfit. They were able to mix and match pieces from the Liz Claiborne collection to create entire outfits. This revolutionized the way department stores arranged clothing for sale and created the role of fashion merchandising as we know it today. Claiborne died on June 26, 2007, at the age of 78 from complications from cancer.
On May 15, 2012, Liz Claiborne Inc. officially became Fifth & Pacific, Inc. and shifted focus to three brands – Juicy Couture, kate spade, and Lucky Brand Jeans. The new name also marked a transition to a direct-to-consumer retailer after decades primarily serving department stores. The new name also reflected the sale of the Liz Claiborne namesake brand to JC Penney Co. in October 2011, as well as other transactions.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“In front of these sinister facts, the first lesson of history is the good of evil. Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)