 | |
| Industry | Fashion |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1989 |
| Founder | George Davies (retailer), Asda |
Number of locations | 300+ |
| Owner | Asda |
George is a British mass market fashion label founded by George Davies for Asda. It is the second best-selling label in the United Kingdom. [1]
The George brand was founded in 1989 as a partnership between English fashion designer George Davies & Asda. The latter had recruited the high-street designer for its grocery store brand to help shoppers avoid high street.
Asda and George were sold to Walmart in 1999, which led to the expansion of the George brand into Walmart stores. [2]
In February 2022, Asda and George were bought by TDR Capital for £6.8 billion pounds. Plans to spin George off into an independent brand have been leaked, but those plans have been denied by the acquiring firm. [1]
The brand is a huge success in the UK, but ultimately is considered a failure in Canada and the United States, as the British success could not be replicated across the Atlantic. [3]
The brand targeted women aged 30-50 years when it was rolled out at Walmart. This demographic wasn’t as receptive to the brand in North America as it was in the UK. [3]
Walmart attempted to fix the issue by targeting a wider demographic by consolidating other labels under one brand. In Canada, this included popular brands such as 725 Originals, B.U.M., and Pennmans. [4]
By 2018, weak sales forced the brand to shrink to just a menswear line. This only impacted their Canada and US lines, which had been preparing to sell the brand in advance. It was split up into four separate brands under Walmart. [5]
Walmart Inc. is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets, discount department stores, and grocery stores in the United States, headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas. The company was founded by brothers Sam and James "Bud" Walton in nearby Rogers, Arkansas in 1962 and incorporated under Delaware General Corporation Law on October 31, 1969. It also owns and operates Sam's Club retail warehouses.
Asda Stores Limited, trading as Asda and often styled as ASDA, is a British supermarket chain. Its headquarters are in Leeds, England. The company was incorporated as Associated Dairies and Farm Stores in 1949. It expanded into Southern England during the 1970s and 1980s, and acquired Allied Carpets, 61 large Gateway Supermarkets and other businesses, such as MFI Group. It sold these acquisitions during the 1990s to concentrate on the supermarkets. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange until 1999 when it was acquired by Walmart for £6.7 billion. Asda was the second-largest supermarket chain in the United Kingdom between 2003 and 2014 by market share, at which point it fell into third place.
Woolco was an American-based discount retail chain. It was founded in 1962 in Columbus, Ohio, by the F. W. Woolworth Company. It was a full-line discount department store unlike the five-and-dime Woolworth stores which operated at the time. At its peak, Woolco had hundreds of stores in the US, as well as in Canada and the United Kingdom. While the American stores were closed in 1983, the chain remained active in Canada until it was sold in 1994 to rival Walmart, which was looking to enter the Canadian market. All of the former UK Woolco stores were sold by Kingfisher, which had bought the UK Woolworth business, to Gateway which subsequently sold them to Asda.
A hypermarket is a big-box store combining a supermarket and a department store. The result is an expansive retail facility carrying a wide range of products under one roof, including full grocery lines and general merchandise. In theory, hypermarkets allow customers to satisfy all their routine shopping needs in one trip. The term hypermarket was coined in 1968 by French trade expert Jacques Pictet.
Next plc (styled as NEXT) is a British multinational clothing, footwear and home products retailer, which has its headquarters in Enderby, England. It has around 700 stores, of which circa 500 are in the United Kingdom, and circa 200 across Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Next is the largest clothing retailer by sales in the United Kingdom, having overtaken Marks & Spencer in early 2012 and 2014. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.
A discount store or discounter offers a retail format in which products are sold at prices that are in principle lower than an actual or supposed "full retail price". Discounters rely on bulk purchasing and efficient distribution to keep down costs.
The American multinational retail chain Walmart has been criticized by many groups and individuals, such as labor unions and small-town advocates, for its policies and business practices, and their effects. Criticisms include charges of racial and gender discrimination, foreign product sourcing, anti-competitive practices, treatment of product suppliers, environmental practices, the use of public subsidies, and its surveillance of its employees. The company has denied any wrongdoing and said that low prices are the result of efficiency.
George William Davies is an English fashion designer and retailer.
Durabrand is a private label tradename of Walmart, which was introduced in early 1999. It was previously available in the UK through ASDA as a replacement for the Pacific brand name.
A big-box store is a physically large retail establishment, usually part of a chain of stores. The term sometimes also refers, by extension, to the company that operates the store. The term "big-box" references the typical appearance of buildings occupied by such stores.
Plus-size clothing is clothing proportioned specifically for people above the average clothing size. The application of the term varies from country to country, and according to which industry the person is involved in.
Walmart Canada is a Canadian retail corporation and the Canadian branch of the U.S.-based multinational retail conglomerate Walmart. Headquartered in Mississauga, Ontario, it was founded on March 17, 1994, with the purchase of the Woolco Canada chain from the F. W. Woolworth Company.
Designer clothing is clothing designed by a particular fashion designer or licensed by a person or brand. It is often luxury clothing proven to be high quality and haute couture for the general public, made by, or carrying the label of, a well-known designer. Licensing of designer names has been a common practice within the fashion industry since about the 1970s. Designer clothing comprises numerous types of apparel, including designer jeans that often cost several hundreds of dollars.
The history of Walmart, an American discount department store chain, began in 1950 when businessman Sam Walton purchased a store from Luther E. Harrison in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and opened Walton's 5 & 10. The Walmart chain proper was founded in 1962 with a single store in Rogers, expanding inside Oklahoma by 1968 and throughout the rest of the Southern United States by the 1980s, ultimately operating a store in every state of the United States, plus its first stores in Canada, by 1995. The expansion was largely fueled by new store construction, although the chains Mohr-Value and Kuhn's Big K were also acquired.
Bestseller A/S is a privately held family-owned clothing and accessories company founded in Denmark in 1975. The company provides affordable fashion for women, men and children. They market their products in 70 markets across most of Europe, the Middle East, Canada, India and globally via E-commerce. They operate almost 9,000 shops worldwide, 6,000 in China and the rest mainly in Europe.
ModCloth is a Los Angeles based online retailer of indie and vintage-inspired women’s clothing.
In the United Kingdom, it is common practice for retailers to have their own value brand in an effort to compete on price. These brands have become more popular in the UK with shoppers since the Great Recession caused food prices to rise.
David Cheesewright is the British former president and CEO of Walmart International, a division of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc..
 | This fashion-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |