A cotton merchant, a named cloth and a mill town.

Cannon began as a cloth before it was a towel. NCpedia, the online edition of the Encyclopedia of North Carolina, says in its entry on Cannon Mills, written by Kevin Cherry in 2006 and revised in December 2021, that James William Cannon, a cotton broker and general merchandiser, founded the business in 1887 in Concord, North Carolina. The steam-powered Cannon Manufacturing Company produced its first yarn on 1 April 1888, according to the entry. Instead of spinning yarn and shipping it north to be woven, as southern mills usually did then, Cannon took raw cotton all the way to a finished fabric, sold as Cannon Cloth, which home sewers used for shirts and pillowcases.

The name was there from the start. A company history of Fieldcrest Cannon in the International Directory of Company Histories, republished online by FundingUniverse, says Cannon chose to put his own name on the fabric his mill made, on the reasoning that sales would rise if customers could ask for a product by name. Towels followed. NCpedia says the company made its first towels in 1890, in a flat or huck weave that the buyer cut and hemmed at home, and that around the turn of the century it began weaving the more absorbent terry, or Turkish, cloth.

The business then grew a town around itself. NCpedia says Cannon bought land north of his first plant in 1906 and built a planned community there with rental houses and a school; that community became Kannapolis. The company history says the Kannapolis mills started work in 1908, and that in 1916 Cannon set up a sales company, Cannon Mills, Inc., in New York City, so that the firm marketed its goods as well as making them.

In 1921 his youngest son, Charles A. Cannon, became president, and the company history says he ran the business for decades afterwards. NCpedia dates the consolidation of the family’s mills into the Cannon Mills Company to 1928, a step the entry credits with helping the business through the Depression.

A takeover, a merger with Fieldcrest and a licensed name.

For most of the twentieth century Cannon stayed close to the family that founded it, and the company history describes it as cautious about debt and slow to diversify. It started making sheets in the 1930s, the profile says, and kept to white for many years. That changed in the early 1980s. NCpedia says that in 1982 the California industrialist and developer David Murdock bought control of Cannon Mills, reorganised its management, redesigned its product lines and remade the Kannapolis business district, which the company history says became the outlet centre Cannon Village.

Murdock did not keep the mills for long. NCpedia says Fieldcrest Mills, Inc., of Eden, North Carolina, bought Cannon’s bath and bedding operations in January 1986, creating a new corporation, Fieldcrest Cannon, Inc., led by Joseph B. Ely II, while Murdock kept the non-industrial property. The combined company sold towels and sheets under Cannon as well as under Fieldcrest, Royal Velvet and other names, according to the company history.

The next owner was a pillow maker from Texas. NCpedia says that in December 1997 Pillowtex, a Dallas-based manufacturer of brand-name home furnishings, bought Fieldcrest Cannon, and that Pillowtex declared bankruptcy in 2003.

The Cannon name outlived the mills. A press release from SB Capital Group dated 6 September 2007 says a consortium it led formed Official Pillowtex, LLC after buying substantially all of Pillowtex’s surviving assets in bankruptcy proceedings in October 2003, and that the licensing company’s four main brands were Cannon, Royal Velvet, Fieldcrest and Charisma. At that point, the release says, Cannon and Royal Velvet were licensed in the United States to Li & Fung USA. The same release announced that Official Pillowtex had agreed to be acquired by Iconix Brand Group, and NCpedia’s 2021 revision says the Cannon brand is owned by Iconix. In June 2021 FashionUnited reported that Iconix had agreed to be acquired by an affiliate of the investment firm Lancer Capital.

Iconix’s Cannon page, under a 2023 Iconix International copyright line, says the brand was founded in 1887 in North Carolina and lists sheets, bedding, bath towels, rugs, kitchen textiles, table linens and window products among its categories. In October 2026 the Cannon website, published under an Iconix International copyright line, sent shoppers to Lands’ End, Kohl’s, Wayfair and Target.

Design and documentation.

Towels, sheets and bedding are sold mostly through packaging and labels rather than through the product itself. A bath towel usually reaches the shelf folded and banded with a paper wrap or a hang tag, while sheets and pillowcases are sold in a clear bag, a printed sleeve or a card-backed pack that shows the size, the fibre and the colour name at a glance.

Once the wrapping is thrown away, the brand lives on in the sewn-in label: a small woven or printed tag in a hem or a seam that carries the name, the fibre content and the care instructions. For many households that tag is the only place the brand name is ever seen again.

Store-brand bedding adds another layer. A name that appears only in one chain’s stores may be owned by the retailer, licensed from another company or made for it by outside suppliers, and the label alone rarely says which.

Each guide in this group separates what independent sources record from what a company says about itself — who started the name, who owns it now, where its textiles are made and how its labels and packs have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name in the hem, a rosebud and a celebrity campaign.

Cannon’s identity rests on a simple decision about where to put the name. The company history in the International Directory of Company Histories says that in 1923 Cannon began having the Cannon name sewn into its towels, so that a household textile usually treated as a commodity carried its maker’s name in the hem. It adds that Cannon, unlike some rivals, used the name on its top-of-the-line goods and on its cheaper ranges alike, and sold much of its output through mass merchandisers. That habit made the word itself, a family surname, the brand’s main visual asset.

The company was slow to dress that name up. The profile says Cannon resisted coloured sheets for years and disdained prints, except for a design of a tightly closed rosebud introduced in 1953; a marketing vice-president later told Forbes that it took years more to get that rosebud opened. In 1972, the profile says, the president of Cannon’s merchandising arm told the same magazine, “We have the Cannon name. We don’t need designers’ names.”

That position softened in the 1980s. The company history says Cannon hired the textile designer Robin Roberts for a more upscale line of sheets and towels, and that after the 1982 takeover the design department was enlarged and most existing towels and sheets were replaced. The Japanese designer Issey Miyake and the Swedish designer Katja were brought in to create their own lines, and an advertising campaign showed well-known public figures posed between Cannon sheets. The profile also mentions a licensed collection tied to the television series Dynasty and a Royal Touch towel within a Royal Family line, aimed at the premium end of the market.

Today the name works as a licence rather than a mill. Iconix presents Cannon as a home brand built on affordability, quality and design, and the products reach shoppers through other retailers’ shelves and websites.

For a design guide, Cannon shows how a maker’s surname, woven into everyday cloth, can carry a brand across a century of changing owners after the factories themselves have gone. Compare it with Fieldcrest, its partner in Fieldcrest Cannon, and Wamsutta, another American sheet and towel name. For this guide we use mill maroon, rosebud pink and terry white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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