Two business-school graduates and a store in Hartford.

The Children’s Place began as a partnership between two members of the Harvard Business School class of 1965, David Pulver and Clinton Clark. A company history published in the International Directory of Company Histories in 2001, and reproduced by FundingUniverse, says the two agreed early on that they did not want careers inside large corporations, and spent several years deciding what kind of business to run. Ideas they weighed included auto repair shops and meltable crayons before they settled on a store for children; both men had children of their own.

They opened The Children’s Place in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1969, the same history says. The shop sold toys as well as clothing and accessories, a mix Clark described to Forbes in a profile of 1 February 1982 as “everything for everyone.” According to the history, many of those lines did not pay, and it took several years of adjusting the range before the store made money. The founders narrowed the offer to medium-priced children’s sportswear with some name-brand clothing, then opened further stores in the eastern United States, mostly in shopping malls, where anchor department stores sold children’s clothes but a small specialist shop could stand alongside them.

By the start of the 1980s the business had a New Jersey address. The New York Times reported on 7 October 1981 that The Children’s Place Inc., “based in Pinebrook, N.J.,” ran children’s specialty apparel stores principally in the East and Middle West, and that its shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange; the company history says Pulver and Clark had taken the chain public in 1981. That day the Times reported an agreement for Federated Department Stores to merge with the chain, with the executive officers of Children’s Place in favour. The company history dates the completed sale to 1982 and says the deal required the founders to train their replacements, so their association with the chain ended soon after.

Under Federated, the history says, the chain kept spreading through malls in the north-east and Midwest, remodelled a few stores to a new prototype in 1984 and then updated others, and gained a new warehouse. In 1986 it started a sister business, The Accessory Place, a mall chain selling accessories to girls and young women.

Federated, a buyout, Nasdaq, Gymboree and Mithaq.

Federated was itself acquired in 1988 by the Toronto-based Campeau Corporation, which put the children’s chain up for sale. The Chicago Tribune reported on 10 November 1988 that Campeau had agreed to sell The Children’s Place, whose division also included The Accessory Place, to TCP Acquisition Corp., a company being formed by Joseph J. Sitt, president of the New York real-estate firm Thor Realty, and Joseph Chehabar, a principal in other apparel companies. The International Directory of Company Histories describes the buyer as an investor group led by Morris Dabah, head of the apparel company Gitano Group, and says Ezra Dabah, then president of Gitano’s children’s division, took over as chief executive.

The 1990s brought a reset. The company history records an out-of-court restructuring of the company’s debts agreed in 1993 and outside investment in 1996, and says that by 1997 the chain had moved away from high-priced branded merchandise towards clothing sold under its own Children’s Place name, available only in its own stores. The company went public on Nasdaq in 1997 under the ticker PLCE, English Wikipedia notes, and in December 2009 it named the former Lord & Taylor chief executive Jane T. Elfers as its president and chief executive from January 2010.

In 2019 the company bought the name of another children’s retailer. MediaPost reported on 4 March 2019 that a court auction in the bankruptcy of the San Francisco retailer Gymboree, released by the bankruptcy court of the Eastern District of Virginia, had made The Children’s Place the buyer of the rights to the Gymboree and Crazy 8 brands, subject to the court’s approval. NJBIZ later wrote that the company acquired Gymboree’s intellectual property and related assets and relaunched it in 2020 as an online business and a store-within-a-store concept. On 20 November 2024 the company opened a standalone Gymboree store at Westfield Garden State Plaza in Paramus, New Jersey, NJBIZ reported on 22 November 2024, quoting the brand president Claudia Lima-Guinehut.

Ownership changed again in 2024. Retail Dive reported on 3 June 2024 that the investment firm Mithaq Capital had bought a majority stake in the company in February 2024, when directors nominated by Mithaq joined the board, and that Elfers had left on 20 May 2024, with Muhammad Umair appointed president and interim chief executive. The company’s second-quarter results release of 14 September 2026 carries a Secaucus, New Jersey, dateline and names Muhammad Asif Seemab as president and interim chief executive.

Design and documentation.

Children’s clothing brands share a particular problem of identity: the people who choose the clothes are rarely the people who wear them. A name and a mark have to speak to parents and grandparents in a shop or on a printed page, while the garment itself has to stay simple enough to be worn, washed and handed down.

Much of that work is done by small, practical pieces of print. A hang-tag is often the first thing a shopper reads, and some children’s labels have used it as more than a price ticket, turning it into a guide to which pieces belong together. Size labels add another layer, because children’s clothing is sized by age, height or a numbered scale, and a brand’s choice of system becomes part of how families recognise it.

Catalogues and their covers have long been another stage for the look of a label, with photography, layout and typography setting a mood before any garment is seen in person. Each guide here separates what independent sources record about a brand — who started it, who owns it now and how its look has changed — from what the company says about itself.

A store name that became a clothing label.

The Children’s Place identity rests on a name that says what the shop is for, and since the 1990s the same words have also served as the label on the clothes. The company history in the International Directory of Company Histories says that by 1997 the chain sold good-quality, value-priced clothing under the Children’s Place name, exclusively in its own stores, after a period in which most of its clothing carried other companies’ brands. In the Ezra Dabah era those brands had included Gloria Vanderbilt, Bugle Boy, OshKosh and Gitano, the history says.

The store has been part of the brand too. The same history describes the prototype stores introduced after the 1988 buyout as having a bright, open floor plan with walls accented by floral wallpaper, a toddler play area, revamped fitting rooms, video monitors and colourful posters and props. English Wikipedia says most of the chain’s stores are in and around regional malls, with others in strip shopping centres, outlets and street locations, and that the company sells in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico, online and through franchise partners abroad. Its range, Wikipedia says, runs from tops, dresses and jackets to shoes, sleepwear and backpacks.

Since 2019 the company has run more than one name. English Wikipedia lists its proprietary brands as The Children’s Place, Gymboree, Sugar & Jade, PJ Place and Crazy 8, and NJBIZ quoted the company describing the 2024 Paramus Gymboree opening as “a new era of growth and innovation in children’s boutique specialty retail.” The Children’s Place name and the Gymboree name now sit under one owner in Secaucus.

For a design guide, The Children’s Place shows how a plain descriptive store name can work as shop sign and clothing label at once, and how a retailer can keep an acquired name trading beside its own. Compare it with Gymboree, the brand it bought at auction in 2019, and OshKosh B’gosh, one of the labels its stores carried in the branded era. For this guide we use storefront blue, pastel pink and cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep The Children’s Place’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.