The Vertical Brand

In an industry where the makers and the sellers were different people, hold everything from design to factory to shop floor in one hand. The word came in 1986, when Donald Fisher of GAP is said to have used «SPA» in an annual report (we could not reach the original text — the term has been copied between Japanese business glossaries, and this map says so). The practice was led by Zara, opened at A Coruña in 1975: new clothes reach the shop in weeks where the industry took half a year, with almost no advertising, the savings poured into shops on the best corners. In Japan, Uniqlo — first store June 1984, a back street in Hiroshima. There was no single day on which it «declared» itself vertical; the shift ran ten quiet years, from direct sourcing in 1988 into the late nineties. In November 1998 the ¥1,900 fleece at the Harajuku store became a phenomenon: twenty-six million pieces in the 2000–01 season. As for GAP, which coined the word — it is rarely spoken of as its best practitioner now. The name stays, someone else completes the thing: this map's history of names, repeating once more.