Eddie Bauer Holdings Inc. (EBH) is a holding company that operates the Eddie Bauer clothing store chain, headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, United States. EBH was formed after Eddie Bauer's former parent company, Spiegel, Inc., went bankrupt in 2003. Eddie Bauer currently operates three independent sales channels:
Retail Stores - Sells "premium" Eddie Bauer merchandise
Outlet Stores - Sells Eddie Bauer merchandise and inventory overstocks at value or clearance price points
Direct Order Center - Sells Eddie Bauer merchandise through call centers in Saint John, New Brunswick, and Groveport, Ohio, and the website (EddieBauer.com)
The company was first established in 1920 in Seattle by Pacific Northwest outdoorsman, Eddie Bauer (1899 – 1986). In 1940 Bauer patented the first quilted down jacket.[1] He went on to patent numerous other designs and was the first independent company that the United States Army hired and allowed to use a logo on the Army-issued uniform.
Bauer retired and sold the company in 1968. General Mills bought Eddie Bauer in 1971, and Spiegel bought it from General Mills in 1988. In 2003, Spiegel, Inc., entered bankruptcy. The Spiegel catalog and all other assets were sold, except for Eddie Bauer. In May 2005, Spiegel, Inc., emerged from bankruptcy under the name "Eddie Bauer Holdings" and owned primarily by Commerzbank. In addition to the three sales channels the company operates a distribution and fulfillment center in Groveport, Ohio; an IT facility in Westmont, Illinois; and a distribution center in Vaughan, Ontario. Eddie Bauer is also a minority participant in joint venture operations in Japan and Germany that include retail stores, catalogs, and websites.[2] The company also selectively licenses the Eddie Bauer brand name and logo for various products sold through other companies including eyewear, furniture, bicycles, and, up until the 2010 model year, upper level versions of Ford Motor Company's Explorer, Expedition and Excursion SUVs.
Eddie Bauer's flagship store is in Bellevue's Bellevue Square mall. A Midwest Flagship opened in August 2010 at Easton Town Center in Columbus, Ohio.
Eddie Bauer Holdings, Inc., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Delaware on June 17, 2009.
Eddie Bauer, Inc. is a catalog, storefront, and e-commerce retailer through two concepts: Eddie Bauer Sportswear, which offers outdoor apparel, sportswear, and accessories; and Eddie Bauer Home, which features bedding, home furnishings, and decor. The company mails out 110 million catalogs per year, with about a quarter of revenues stemming from catalog and web site orders. On the storefront side, there are 430 Eddie Bauer sportswear stores in North America and 38 Eddie Bauer Home units in the United States. To clear excess merchandise, the company runs an additional 52 Eddie Bauer Outlet stores in the United States, as well as the eddiebaueroutlet.com web site. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of catalog retailer Spiegel, Inc., which in turn is controlled by Germany's Otto family, majority owners and operators of Otto Versand GmbH & Co., the world's largest mail-order firm. Through joint ventures with units of Otto Versand, Eddie Bauer operates retail outlets and distributes catalogs in Japan and Germany and has a cataloging only venture in the United Kingdom. The company also licenses the Eddie Bauer brand to several other companies, including Ford Motor Company, which has made Eddie Bauer edition sport-utility vehicles since 1984; the Lane Company, for a line of Eddie Bauer furniture; and Cosco, Inc., which sells Eddie Bauer car seats.
In March 1971 food conglomerate General Mills, Inc. purchased Eddie Bauer for about 311,000 shares of General Mills common stock, or about $10 million. The acquisition of Eddie Bauer was part of General Mills' aggressive move into specialty retailing. What General Mills received was still essentially a mail-order business, with a small retail side. It was the latter segment of Eddie Bauer that General Mills wanted to fortify.
Several years passed, however, before the disparate merchandising philosophies of the two companies would effectively join together and even longer until Eddie Bauer obtained consistent leadership. From 1975 to 1978 the company went through four presidents, until finally settling on James J. Casey, who had joined Eddie Bauer three years earlier. At this time, the state of Eddie Bauer's product line was still in flux, as General Mills attempted to reshape its subsidiary's market appeal. Six months after Casey assumed leadership of the company, he maneuvered it away from a merchandising failure that had added golf and tennis apparel to the company's product line. For customers inured to a product line whose reputation had been built on manufacturing down parkas and outfitting expeditions to the Antarctic, the shift was a difficult one to make, and potential customers went elsewhere when purchasing items for warmer climes. Although General Mills continued to struggle with the specialty outdoor market niche, it had increased the number of Eddie Bauer retail locations. By the end of the decade, there were 16 retail stores and plans in place to double that figure. In General Mills' first year of ownership, Eddie Bauer posted $11 million in sales, and, with the boost in sales provided by the additional stores, sales climbed to $80 million, ranking the company second only to L.L. Bean, Inc. in the specialty outdoor market. The disparity between retail and catalog sales disappeared, with half of the total revenues generated by the stores, and 14 million catalog customers accounting for the remainder. In the meantime, the company moved its headquarters once again in 1973, settling into a 14-acre campus in Redmond, Washington.
By 1984, the changes initiated by General Mills had substantially altered the image Eddie Bauer projected to its customers. Apparel now generated approximately 70 percent of the retail store revenues, and much of it did not resemble the clothing worn by members of a Mount Everest expedition, or even the clothing worn by weekend adventurers camping in the woods. Tents, backpacks, and fishing rods had slowly begun to disappear from the shelves of the company's stores and were replaced with oxford cloth shirts, lamb's wool sweaters, and other items uncharacteristic of the rugged, expedition outfitter. With 41 stores located in Canada and the United States, the company broadened its appeal&mdash-ough for Ford Motor Company to begin production of the Eddie Bauer Bronco II in 1984--and attracted a more diverse clientele. The expansion of the retail side of the business represented a move toward greater growth for the mail-order segment as well. In 1983, Eddie Bauer mailed 14 million catalogs, and, by the following year, 30 million catalogs were sent to potential customers, two million of which were printed in French to accommodate the company's burgeoning clientele in Canada. Plans called for further expansion of the company's retail business, some 60 stores over the next five years. To lead the company toward this goal, a switch in leadership was made. In 1984, Michael Rayden replaced Casey and began separating retail, mail-order, and manufacturing into three distinct divisions.
By 1988, Eddie Bauer had 57 retail stores located in the United States and Canada. But just as General Mills was announcing further plans to augment Eddie Bauer's retail holdings, the corporation put Eddie Bauer up for sale along with another specialty clothing chain it owned, Talbots, in a bid to divest itself of all nonfood-related businesses.
1988 into the 21st Century: The Spiegel Era
In 1988 Spiegel, Inc., a catalog marketer of apparel, home furnishings, and other merchandise, bought Eddie Bauer for $260 million, roughly equal to the sales the company generated at the time of its purchase. Wayne Badovinus was selected to lead Eddie Bauer and, over the next two years, 100 stores were added to the retail chain, bringing total sales up to $448 million. In 1991, Eddie Bauer's first 'Premier' store was opened in Chicago, which housed all of the company's recently introduced specialty product lines. 'All Week Long,' Eddie Bauer's collection of women's sportswear and casual attire, first introduced as a catalog business in 1987, had evolved into a retail business by 1991 with the opening of its first store in Portland, Oregon, and now was part of the Premier store concept. Also included in the Premier stores were 'The Sport Shop at Eddie Bauer,' featuring custom-built fishing rods, reels, and fishing flies, and 'The Eddie Bauer Home Collection,' which sold a wide assortment of indoor and outdoor furnishings. The addition of these specialty retail concepts, each first introduced in 1991, marked another dramatic leap in revenues. In the three years since Spiegel had purchased Eddie Bauer, the parent company had witnessed an increase in revenues from roughly $260 million, to nearly $750 million, occasioned primarily by the dramatic increase in Eddie Bauer's retail business. This expansion continued after 1991, giving the company 265 retail stores by the end of 1992. Eddie Bauer Home became the longest lasting of the new concepts, and by 1994 there were 15 such outlets in 11 states, and the company was mailing out separate Home catalogs six times per year. Revenues surpassed the $1 billion mark for the first time in 1993.
The mid-1990s were marked by continued expansion in North America as well as the company's first forays into overseas territory. The international expansion was pursued through joint ventures with units of Otto Versand (GmbH & Co.), a German mail-order giant controlled by the Otto family, which also controlled Spiegel. In 1993 Eddie Bauer entered into a venture with Otto-Sumisho, Inc. to open retail stores and sell through catalogs in Japan. Two years later the company joined with Otto Versand unit's Heinrich Heine GmbH and Sport-Scheck GmbH in another venture created to launch retail and catalog sales in Germany. By the end of the decade there were 35 Eddie Bauer stores in Japan and nine in Germany. A similar venture for the U.K. market was created in 1996 but was discontinued three years later, with catalog sales continuing through Eddie Bauer's German joint venture.
During 1995, when the company celebrated its 75th anniversary, Eddie Bauer launched a new retail and catalog concept, called AKA Eddie Bauer, selling upscale dress clothing for men and women--a new line aimed at the burgeoning market for more casual work clothes. The company's All Week Long concept was discontinued, with those stores converted into AKA Eddie Bauer units. Even amidst a slump in the entire retailing industry, Eddie Bauer continued to expand in other ways as well. In 1996 came the debut of the EBTEK line of high performance outerwear and casual activewear featuring such fabrics as Goretex and Polartec 200. That same year, the company established a third distribution channel with the launching of its Internet web site. Bucking the early trend in e-commerce, eddiebauer.com was generating a profit within two years of its debut. During 1997 Eddie Bauer opened its 500th U.S. store.
With its Ford partnership continuing, Eddie Bauer entered into several more licensing deals in the late 1990s to further leverage its increasingly well-known name. In 1997 the company inked a deal with the Lane Company for the development of a line of Eddie Bauer furniture. The following year Eddie Bauer mountain bikes were launched with Giant Bicycle, Inc.; Eddie Bauer eyewear debuted through an agreement with Signature Eyewear, Inc.; and Eddie Bauer infant and juvenile car seats were introduced in conjunction with Cosco, Inc.
After adding a net 39 stores in 1998, and suffering from declining sales because of increased competition and a slow reaction to hot new fashion trends such as cargo pants, Eddie Bauer reined in its North American expansion the following year, when the chain's net gain was just nine stores. The company also made some alterations to its store concepts that year. Eddie Bauer Home was revamped to include less in the way of upholstered furniture and tabletop items and more of the domestic items for bed and bath, such as bedding and towels. The 40 home stores also began featuring the Eddie Bauer Juvenile line of bedding and beds and increased its 'baby by Eddie Bauer' line of infant bedding and furniture. The AKA Eddie Bauer concept was discontinued in the form of separate stores, and the AKA merchandise was integrated into adjacent Eddie Bauer sportswear stores.
With a revamp of its sportswear lines, Eddie Bauer managed to post a six percent increase in comparable store sales in 1999, compared with a nine percent decrease the previous year. Overall revenues increased slightly that year, reaching $1.79 billion. During 2000, when Eddie Bauer planned to increase its North American retail units to 565 and to expand or remodel 40 existing stores, a milestone was reached when the first Eddie Bauer store opened in Hawaii, completing the chain's entrance into all 50 states.
Since 1920, the Eddie Bauer name has evoked several images. What once represented fishing tackle, guns, and mountaineering equipment now, in the early 21st century, stood for durable, comfortable apparel As Eddie Bauer planned for the future, supported by its multiple channels of distribution, its product lines appeared to remain as strong as the legendary Eddie Bauer name.
Principal Subsidiaries: Eddie Bauer of Canada, Inc.; Eddie Bauer International, Inc.
Principal Competitors: Abercrombie & Fitch Co.; American Eagle Outfitters, Inc.; Coldwater Creek Inc.; Cornerstone Brands, Inc.; Dillard's Inc.; Euromarket Designs Inc.; Federated Department Stores, Inc.; The Gap, Inc.; Hanover Direct, Inc.; J.C. Penney Company, Inc.; J. Crew Group, Inc.; The J. Jill Group, Inc.; L.L. Bean, Inc.; Lands' End, Inc.; The Limited, Inc.; The May Department Stores Company; Montgomery Ward, LLC; The Neiman Marcus Group, Inc.; Nordstrom, Inc.; Pier 1 Imports, Inc.; Saks Incorporated; Sears, Roebuck and Co.; The Talbots, Inc.; Target Corporation; Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.; Williams-Sonoma, Inc.
Statistics:
Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Spiegel, Inc.
Incorporated: 1968
Employees: 10,000
Sales: $1.79 billion (1999)
NAIC: 442299 All Other Home Furnishings Stores; 454110 Electronic Shopping and Mail-Order Houses; 448140 Family Clothing Stores
Key Dates:
1920: Eddie Bauer opens Eddie Bauer's Sport Shop in Seattle.
1922: Bauer begins offering his customers an unconditional guarantee of satisfaction.
1924: Store is renamed Eddie Bauer's Sporting Goods.
1936: Bauer patents and introduces the first goose down insulated jacket, marking the company's entrance into outdoor apparel.
1942: Bauer begins providing goose down products to the U.S. Army Air Corps.
1945: Company sends out its first mail-order catalogs.
1953: Company is reorganized as a 50--50 partnership between Eddie Bauer and William F. Niemi, Sr., under the name William F. Niemi Co., doing business as Eddie Bauer Expedition Outfitters.
1968: Bauer retires, selling his interest in the company to Niemi; the company is incorporated as Eddie Bauer, Inc.
1971: General Mills, Inc. acquires Eddie Bauer for $10 million.
1984: Through a licensing deal with Ford, the first Eddie Bauer edition SUV makes its debut.
1988: Spiegel, Inc. acquires the company for $260 million.
1991: Eddie Bauer Home makes its debut.
1993: Company enters into joint venture to open stores and start catalog operations in Japan.
1995: Joint venture is created to form retailing and cataloging operations in Germany.
1996: Company moves into e-commerce with the launch of eddiebauer.com.
2000: With expansion into Hawaii, there are now Eddie Bauer stores in all 50 states.
Address:
Post Office Box 97000
Redmond, Washington 98073-9700
U.S.A.
Retail Stores - Sells "premium" Eddie Bauer merchandise
Outlet Stores - Sells Eddie Bauer merchandise and inventory overstocks at value or clearance price points
Direct Order Center - Sells Eddie Bauer merchandise through call centers in Saint John, New Brunswick, and Groveport, Ohio, and the website (EddieBauer.com)
The company was first established in 1920 in Seattle by Pacific Northwest outdoorsman, Eddie Bauer (1899 – 1986). In 1940 Bauer patented the first quilted down jacket.[1] He went on to patent numerous other designs and was the first independent company that the United States Army hired and allowed to use a logo on the Army-issued uniform.
Bauer retired and sold the company in 1968. General Mills bought Eddie Bauer in 1971, and Spiegel bought it from General Mills in 1988. In 2003, Spiegel, Inc., entered bankruptcy. The Spiegel catalog and all other assets were sold, except for Eddie Bauer. In May 2005, Spiegel, Inc., emerged from bankruptcy under the name "Eddie Bauer Holdings" and owned primarily by Commerzbank. In addition to the three sales channels the company operates a distribution and fulfillment center in Groveport, Ohio; an IT facility in Westmont, Illinois; and a distribution center in Vaughan, Ontario. Eddie Bauer is also a minority participant in joint venture operations in Japan and Germany that include retail stores, catalogs, and websites.[2] The company also selectively licenses the Eddie Bauer brand name and logo for various products sold through other companies including eyewear, furniture, bicycles, and, up until the 2010 model year, upper level versions of Ford Motor Company's Explorer, Expedition and Excursion SUVs.
Eddie Bauer's flagship store is in Bellevue's Bellevue Square mall. A Midwest Flagship opened in August 2010 at Easton Town Center in Columbus, Ohio.
Eddie Bauer Holdings, Inc., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Delaware on June 17, 2009.
Eddie Bauer, Inc. is a catalog, storefront, and e-commerce retailer through two concepts: Eddie Bauer Sportswear, which offers outdoor apparel, sportswear, and accessories; and Eddie Bauer Home, which features bedding, home furnishings, and decor. The company mails out 110 million catalogs per year, with about a quarter of revenues stemming from catalog and web site orders. On the storefront side, there are 430 Eddie Bauer sportswear stores in North America and 38 Eddie Bauer Home units in the United States. To clear excess merchandise, the company runs an additional 52 Eddie Bauer Outlet stores in the United States, as well as the eddiebaueroutlet.com web site. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of catalog retailer Spiegel, Inc., which in turn is controlled by Germany's Otto family, majority owners and operators of Otto Versand GmbH & Co., the world's largest mail-order firm. Through joint ventures with units of Otto Versand, Eddie Bauer operates retail outlets and distributes catalogs in Japan and Germany and has a cataloging only venture in the United Kingdom. The company also licenses the Eddie Bauer brand to several other companies, including Ford Motor Company, which has made Eddie Bauer edition sport-utility vehicles since 1984; the Lane Company, for a line of Eddie Bauer furniture; and Cosco, Inc., which sells Eddie Bauer car seats.
In March 1971 food conglomerate General Mills, Inc. purchased Eddie Bauer for about 311,000 shares of General Mills common stock, or about $10 million. The acquisition of Eddie Bauer was part of General Mills' aggressive move into specialty retailing. What General Mills received was still essentially a mail-order business, with a small retail side. It was the latter segment of Eddie Bauer that General Mills wanted to fortify.
Several years passed, however, before the disparate merchandising philosophies of the two companies would effectively join together and even longer until Eddie Bauer obtained consistent leadership. From 1975 to 1978 the company went through four presidents, until finally settling on James J. Casey, who had joined Eddie Bauer three years earlier. At this time, the state of Eddie Bauer's product line was still in flux, as General Mills attempted to reshape its subsidiary's market appeal. Six months after Casey assumed leadership of the company, he maneuvered it away from a merchandising failure that had added golf and tennis apparel to the company's product line. For customers inured to a product line whose reputation had been built on manufacturing down parkas and outfitting expeditions to the Antarctic, the shift was a difficult one to make, and potential customers went elsewhere when purchasing items for warmer climes. Although General Mills continued to struggle with the specialty outdoor market niche, it had increased the number of Eddie Bauer retail locations. By the end of the decade, there were 16 retail stores and plans in place to double that figure. In General Mills' first year of ownership, Eddie Bauer posted $11 million in sales, and, with the boost in sales provided by the additional stores, sales climbed to $80 million, ranking the company second only to L.L. Bean, Inc. in the specialty outdoor market. The disparity between retail and catalog sales disappeared, with half of the total revenues generated by the stores, and 14 million catalog customers accounting for the remainder. In the meantime, the company moved its headquarters once again in 1973, settling into a 14-acre campus in Redmond, Washington.
By 1984, the changes initiated by General Mills had substantially altered the image Eddie Bauer projected to its customers. Apparel now generated approximately 70 percent of the retail store revenues, and much of it did not resemble the clothing worn by members of a Mount Everest expedition, or even the clothing worn by weekend adventurers camping in the woods. Tents, backpacks, and fishing rods had slowly begun to disappear from the shelves of the company's stores and were replaced with oxford cloth shirts, lamb's wool sweaters, and other items uncharacteristic of the rugged, expedition outfitter. With 41 stores located in Canada and the United States, the company broadened its appeal&mdash-ough for Ford Motor Company to begin production of the Eddie Bauer Bronco II in 1984--and attracted a more diverse clientele. The expansion of the retail side of the business represented a move toward greater growth for the mail-order segment as well. In 1983, Eddie Bauer mailed 14 million catalogs, and, by the following year, 30 million catalogs were sent to potential customers, two million of which were printed in French to accommodate the company's burgeoning clientele in Canada. Plans called for further expansion of the company's retail business, some 60 stores over the next five years. To lead the company toward this goal, a switch in leadership was made. In 1984, Michael Rayden replaced Casey and began separating retail, mail-order, and manufacturing into three distinct divisions.
By 1988, Eddie Bauer had 57 retail stores located in the United States and Canada. But just as General Mills was announcing further plans to augment Eddie Bauer's retail holdings, the corporation put Eddie Bauer up for sale along with another specialty clothing chain it owned, Talbots, in a bid to divest itself of all nonfood-related businesses.
1988 into the 21st Century: The Spiegel Era
In 1988 Spiegel, Inc., a catalog marketer of apparel, home furnishings, and other merchandise, bought Eddie Bauer for $260 million, roughly equal to the sales the company generated at the time of its purchase. Wayne Badovinus was selected to lead Eddie Bauer and, over the next two years, 100 stores were added to the retail chain, bringing total sales up to $448 million. In 1991, Eddie Bauer's first 'Premier' store was opened in Chicago, which housed all of the company's recently introduced specialty product lines. 'All Week Long,' Eddie Bauer's collection of women's sportswear and casual attire, first introduced as a catalog business in 1987, had evolved into a retail business by 1991 with the opening of its first store in Portland, Oregon, and now was part of the Premier store concept. Also included in the Premier stores were 'The Sport Shop at Eddie Bauer,' featuring custom-built fishing rods, reels, and fishing flies, and 'The Eddie Bauer Home Collection,' which sold a wide assortment of indoor and outdoor furnishings. The addition of these specialty retail concepts, each first introduced in 1991, marked another dramatic leap in revenues. In the three years since Spiegel had purchased Eddie Bauer, the parent company had witnessed an increase in revenues from roughly $260 million, to nearly $750 million, occasioned primarily by the dramatic increase in Eddie Bauer's retail business. This expansion continued after 1991, giving the company 265 retail stores by the end of 1992. Eddie Bauer Home became the longest lasting of the new concepts, and by 1994 there were 15 such outlets in 11 states, and the company was mailing out separate Home catalogs six times per year. Revenues surpassed the $1 billion mark for the first time in 1993.
The mid-1990s were marked by continued expansion in North America as well as the company's first forays into overseas territory. The international expansion was pursued through joint ventures with units of Otto Versand (GmbH & Co.), a German mail-order giant controlled by the Otto family, which also controlled Spiegel. In 1993 Eddie Bauer entered into a venture with Otto-Sumisho, Inc. to open retail stores and sell through catalogs in Japan. Two years later the company joined with Otto Versand unit's Heinrich Heine GmbH and Sport-Scheck GmbH in another venture created to launch retail and catalog sales in Germany. By the end of the decade there were 35 Eddie Bauer stores in Japan and nine in Germany. A similar venture for the U.K. market was created in 1996 but was discontinued three years later, with catalog sales continuing through Eddie Bauer's German joint venture.
During 1995, when the company celebrated its 75th anniversary, Eddie Bauer launched a new retail and catalog concept, called AKA Eddie Bauer, selling upscale dress clothing for men and women--a new line aimed at the burgeoning market for more casual work clothes. The company's All Week Long concept was discontinued, with those stores converted into AKA Eddie Bauer units. Even amidst a slump in the entire retailing industry, Eddie Bauer continued to expand in other ways as well. In 1996 came the debut of the EBTEK line of high performance outerwear and casual activewear featuring such fabrics as Goretex and Polartec 200. That same year, the company established a third distribution channel with the launching of its Internet web site. Bucking the early trend in e-commerce, eddiebauer.com was generating a profit within two years of its debut. During 1997 Eddie Bauer opened its 500th U.S. store.
With its Ford partnership continuing, Eddie Bauer entered into several more licensing deals in the late 1990s to further leverage its increasingly well-known name. In 1997 the company inked a deal with the Lane Company for the development of a line of Eddie Bauer furniture. The following year Eddie Bauer mountain bikes were launched with Giant Bicycle, Inc.; Eddie Bauer eyewear debuted through an agreement with Signature Eyewear, Inc.; and Eddie Bauer infant and juvenile car seats were introduced in conjunction with Cosco, Inc.
After adding a net 39 stores in 1998, and suffering from declining sales because of increased competition and a slow reaction to hot new fashion trends such as cargo pants, Eddie Bauer reined in its North American expansion the following year, when the chain's net gain was just nine stores. The company also made some alterations to its store concepts that year. Eddie Bauer Home was revamped to include less in the way of upholstered furniture and tabletop items and more of the domestic items for bed and bath, such as bedding and towels. The 40 home stores also began featuring the Eddie Bauer Juvenile line of bedding and beds and increased its 'baby by Eddie Bauer' line of infant bedding and furniture. The AKA Eddie Bauer concept was discontinued in the form of separate stores, and the AKA merchandise was integrated into adjacent Eddie Bauer sportswear stores.
With a revamp of its sportswear lines, Eddie Bauer managed to post a six percent increase in comparable store sales in 1999, compared with a nine percent decrease the previous year. Overall revenues increased slightly that year, reaching $1.79 billion. During 2000, when Eddie Bauer planned to increase its North American retail units to 565 and to expand or remodel 40 existing stores, a milestone was reached when the first Eddie Bauer store opened in Hawaii, completing the chain's entrance into all 50 states.
Since 1920, the Eddie Bauer name has evoked several images. What once represented fishing tackle, guns, and mountaineering equipment now, in the early 21st century, stood for durable, comfortable apparel As Eddie Bauer planned for the future, supported by its multiple channels of distribution, its product lines appeared to remain as strong as the legendary Eddie Bauer name.
Principal Subsidiaries: Eddie Bauer of Canada, Inc.; Eddie Bauer International, Inc.
Principal Competitors: Abercrombie & Fitch Co.; American Eagle Outfitters, Inc.; Coldwater Creek Inc.; Cornerstone Brands, Inc.; Dillard's Inc.; Euromarket Designs Inc.; Federated Department Stores, Inc.; The Gap, Inc.; Hanover Direct, Inc.; J.C. Penney Company, Inc.; J. Crew Group, Inc.; The J. Jill Group, Inc.; L.L. Bean, Inc.; Lands' End, Inc.; The Limited, Inc.; The May Department Stores Company; Montgomery Ward, LLC; The Neiman Marcus Group, Inc.; Nordstrom, Inc.; Pier 1 Imports, Inc.; Saks Incorporated; Sears, Roebuck and Co.; The Talbots, Inc.; Target Corporation; Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.; Williams-Sonoma, Inc.
Statistics:
Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Spiegel, Inc.
Incorporated: 1968
Employees: 10,000
Sales: $1.79 billion (1999)
NAIC: 442299 All Other Home Furnishings Stores; 454110 Electronic Shopping and Mail-Order Houses; 448140 Family Clothing Stores
Key Dates:
1920: Eddie Bauer opens Eddie Bauer's Sport Shop in Seattle.
1922: Bauer begins offering his customers an unconditional guarantee of satisfaction.
1924: Store is renamed Eddie Bauer's Sporting Goods.
1936: Bauer patents and introduces the first goose down insulated jacket, marking the company's entrance into outdoor apparel.
1942: Bauer begins providing goose down products to the U.S. Army Air Corps.
1945: Company sends out its first mail-order catalogs.
1953: Company is reorganized as a 50--50 partnership between Eddie Bauer and William F. Niemi, Sr., under the name William F. Niemi Co., doing business as Eddie Bauer Expedition Outfitters.
1968: Bauer retires, selling his interest in the company to Niemi; the company is incorporated as Eddie Bauer, Inc.
1971: General Mills, Inc. acquires Eddie Bauer for $10 million.
1984: Through a licensing deal with Ford, the first Eddie Bauer edition SUV makes its debut.
1988: Spiegel, Inc. acquires the company for $260 million.
1991: Eddie Bauer Home makes its debut.
1993: Company enters into joint venture to open stores and start catalog operations in Japan.
1995: Joint venture is created to form retailing and cataloging operations in Germany.
1996: Company moves into e-commerce with the launch of eddiebauer.com.
2000: With expansion into Hawaii, there are now Eddie Bauer stores in all 50 states.
Address:
Post Office Box 97000
Redmond, Washington 98073-9700
U.S.A.