A cheaper Gap, a forklift and a name found in Paris.

Old Navy began inside Gap Inc. as a response to a rival’s plan. The International Directory of Company Histories, in its entry on the chain, says that in the early 1990s Gap’s chief executive Millard “Mickey” Drexler learned that Dayton Hudson, then the operator of Target and Mervyn’s, was preparing a new chain called Everyday Hero, pitched as a cheaper version of Gap. Drexler had assistants buy inexpensive clothes from other retailers, laid them out on a boardroom table and asked his advisers whether Gap could produce a lower-priced line of its own. In August 1993 the company converted some of its Gap outlets to the new format under the banner Gap Warehouse.

The Los Angeles Times described the same move in February 1998: the company turned poorly performing Gap stores into Gap Warehouse outlets in 1993 and, in 1994, dropped the Gap Warehouse nameplate and converted the outlets into Old Navy stores. Drexler told the paper that the decision followed a simple observation about where American shoppers were spending, and that he wanted a new retail identity with its own branded merchandise rather than a discounted Gap.

The name itself came from a walk. The International Directory of Company Histories says Drexler dismissed suggestions such as “Forklift” and chose Old Navy after seeing the name on a bar in Paris; English Wikipedia adds “Monorail” to the rejected list and dates the renaming of Gap Warehouse as Old Navy Clothing Co. to 11 March 1994. The directory says the store designed specifically as an Old Navy opened in 1994 in a shopping centre in Colma, California, south of San Francisco. Wikipedia names Colma, San Leandro and Pittsburg, all in northern California, as the towns where the earliest Old Navy locations opened that March.

From the start the chain was set apart from its parent in look as well as price. Wikipedia, citing Gap’s director of stores at the time, Kevin Lonergan, says the stores were planned like grocery stores, with flowing aisles, shopping carts and small items near the tills, and that cement floors, metal shelving and counters of pressed board and galvanised metal gave them the feel of an industrial warehouse.

A management trio, a dog and a cast of retro stars.

In its early years Old Navy had no chief executive of its own. The Los Angeles Times reported in 1998 that the chain was run by a trio: Richard Crisman, a senior vice president who directed marketing; Jenny Ming, an executive vice president who chose the merchandise; and Kevin Lonergan, who ran stores and operations. Disagreements, the paper said, were settled by Drexler. The International Directory of Company Histories says Ming had been at the table from the beginning, making the calls to overseas garment factories to test whether a cheaper line could be made, and that she was appointed president of Old Navy in April 1999.

Crisman’s department gave the chain its voice. The Los Angeles Times listed the Rockettes, an animal mascot called Magic the Dog and print advertisements that featured no models among its marketing, and described a television campaign in which Magic played a series of roles, including an Oscar winner and a game-show contestant, to promote an “Item of the Week”. Crisman summed up the message for the paper as “Shopping’s fun and everyone’s welcome.”

The television advertising also leaned on familiar faces from earlier decades. The International Directory of Company Histories dates the start of the quirky campaigns to 1997, when Morgan Fairchild and the Smothers Brothers began appearing for the brand. In January 1998 The New York Observer profiled Carrie Donovan, the former style editor of The New York Times, who had become a national figure through the commercials; she sang the line “They call it fleece. I call it chic” in the Christmas spots alongside Fairchild, the Smothers Brothers and Magic, and wrote an Old Navy advertisement in the form of a newspaper column that ran in the Times on Fridays.

The chain moved beyond the United States in April 2001, when the directory says it opened its Canadian stores in Ontario on the same day. In September 2007, BusinessWeek reported in 2009, the designer Todd Oldham was named Old Navy’s design creative director, an arrangement that ended before his contract ran out. Gap Inc. announced in February 2019 that it would spin Old Navy off as a separate public company, then said on 16 January 2020 that it no longer intended to do so. Gap Inc. has owned Old Navy since the chain was created, and Wikipedia places its corporate operations in the Mission Bay neighbourhood of San Francisco.

Design and documentation.

A fashion retailer’s identity is met first on the street. The fascia above the shopfront carries the name at a scale meant to be read from across the road, so the wordmark may need to work in illuminated letters, in flat paint and in vinyl on glass. Inside, the same mark returns at a smaller size on till points, fitting-room doors and wayfinding signs, and the colour that sits behind it can be as recognisable as the letters themselves.

The shopping bag leaves the shop with the customer. Paper, plastic or fabric, with twisted or flat handles, a bag carries the name out of the shop and down the street, and its design can be as plain as one colour field, one mark and generous margins.

Swing tags and woven labels do quieter work. The tag carries size, care and code information, but its card weight, colour and typeface also signal which line or sub-brand a garment belongs to.

Window displays change with the seasons. Seasonal schemes, mannequin styling and printed graphics let a retailer refresh its look without touching the fascia, while the logo on the fascia stays the same.

A borrowed name, an industrial shop floor and a comic voice.

Old Navy’s identity was assembled from three parts that did not come from the clothes. One was the name, two plain words taken from a sign in Paris rather than from the Gap name, which the company had used for the Gap Warehouse outlets until 1994. Another was the store. The Los Angeles Times described Old Navy shops in 1998 as having exposed faux ceiling pipes, concrete floors and display bins built as life-sized replicas of trucks, and the International Directory of Company Histories calls the look “industrial chic”, with exposed pipes, cement floors and chrome fixtures. Shopping carts, galvanised metal and pressed-board counters, as Wikipedia records, carried the warehouse idea through to the checkout.

The last was the voice. Magic the dog, the Rockettes, print advertisements without models and a rotating cast of familiar television faces gave Old Navy a comic, inclusive tone that Richard Crisman explained to the Los Angeles Times in 1998: “Everyone likes to laugh, and we use humor to reach out and be inclusive.” Carrie Donovan’s fleece line, sung in the Christmas commercials, and her weekly column-style advertisement in The New York Times carried the same personality from television into print.

The identity has been reworked more than once. Wikipedia says that in 2005, under the then president Dawn Robertson, the chain introduced a new logo and a boutique-style “New Old Navy” store design with murals, mirrored accents and in-house advertising aimed at a more fashion-led image, and that the approach was later abandoned. A second programme, Project ONE, began in 2011 with brighter colours, clearer layouts and better lighting aimed at families. Through both programmes the name itself, and the Gap Inc. ownership behind it, stayed the same.

For a design guide, Old Navy shows how a retailer created inside a larger company can build an identity of its own from a found name, a warehouse floor and a sense of humour rather than from a founding story. Compare it with its parent Gap and with its sister chain Banana Republic, which Gap bought in 1983. For this guide we use old navy, fleece blue and concrete with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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