A knitting mill in a small Alabama town.

Russell Athletic began as a knitting mill in Alexander City, Alabama, in 1902. The Encyclopedia of Alabama records that Benjamin Russell, a lawyer who had returned home to run his family’s store and had founded a bank in the town, set up Russell Manufacturing Company that year, after a fire gutted Alexander City’s business district. The mill began in a small wooden building with a handful of knitting and sewing machines, and its early product was ladies’ knitted undershirts. By 1925, the encyclopedia says, the range had grown to long underwear, sweaters, athletic shirts and bloomers.

The athletic business came in the 1930s. The encyclopedia describes an athletics division named the Southern Manufacturing Company, set up to make team apparel, whose early work included football jerseys for a sporting-goods distributor in New York and pants for football, baseball and basketball teams; Wikipedia dates the acquisition of Southern Manufacturing to 1932 and says it marked the start of the Russell Athletic division’s cutting and sewing operations. In 1938, according to the encyclopedia, Russell developed a screen-printing method that let it print names, numbers and designs on athletic uniforms.

The garment the brand ties to its name is the cotton sweatshirt. The brand’s own history, as quoted by the trade publication SGB in 2017, says that in 1926 the founder’s son, Benjamin “Benny” Russell, came up with the idea of an all-cotton practice football jersey to replace the wool uniforms then worn by players. Wikipedia places the cotton jersey in 1920 and credits father and son together.

The war years reshaped the mill. The encyclopedia says civilian textile work was curtailed in the 1940s to meet government wartime contracts, and Wikipedia says the athletic division sold mainly to the military in those years, making shirts, drawers, T-shirts and athletic garments for the Army and Navy. The family stayed in charge into the postwar decades: Thomas D. Russell took the helm in 1945, and Eugene C. Gwaltney became president in 1968, the encyclopedia records.

From Russell Mills to Berkshire Hathaway.

The company changed its name to Russell Mills, Inc. in 1962, became publicly traded in 1963 and took the name Russell Corporation in 1973, the Encyclopedia of Alabama records. The encyclopedia lists a new sewing plant in Montgomery in 1966, a yarn plant in northeast Georgia and an enlarged screen-printing operation in the 1970s, the consolidation of its knitting into one plant in 1981, and the purchase of Cloathbond Ltd. in Scotland in 1989. In 1983, SGB reported in 2017, citing the brand’s history, Russell Athletic became the official uniform of Little League Baseball and Softball.

In 2006 the company changed hands. Wikipedia records that Berkshire Hathaway agreed on 17 April 2006 to buy Russell and completed the purchase that August, and that Russell’s brands joined Fruit of the Loom in the Berkshire family; the encyclopedia says Russell was made a subsidiary of Berkshire’s Fruit of the Loom business. Berkshire Hathaway has owned Russell Athletic since 2006. In 2008 and 2009 a number of universities ended licensing agreements with Russell over the closure of a unionized factory in Honduras, and in November 2009 the company reached an agreement with a Honduran union, the encyclopedia records. In January 2009 Russell closed its Atlanta headquarters and kept the one in Alexander City; Wikipedia now gives Russell Athletic’s base as Bowling Green, Kentucky, as a subsidiary of Fruit of the Loom.

On 28 September 2017, SGB reported, Russell Athletic told team dealers it would leave the team-uniform business to put more weight on consumer retail. A letter from Kevin Reber, vice president of sales, said the brand would stop accepting new made-to-order and decorated orders by 15 December 2017 and would honour school outfitting contracts through the rest of that year. The exit did not last. In June 2018, ASI Central reported, Russell Athletic and Georgia-based Augusta Sportswear announced a partnership under which Augusta would exclusively make, market and sell Russell Athletic team uniforms for basketball, baseball, softball and football, along with workout apparel such as fleece and tees. Matt Murphy, Russell Athletic’s vice president of marketing, described the brand’s legacy in the release as outfitting athletes for generations.

Athletic apparel and sneaker brands.

The brands in this group are athletic apparel and sneaker names. On a sneaker, a brand’s identity is usually carried by a handful of small, repeated places rather than by one large surface: the mark stitched or printed on the side panel, the label sewn to the tongue, the heel tab, the insole print and the box the pair is sold in. Each of those places is small, and each is seen at a different distance — the side mark from across a street, the tongue label from arm’s length, the insole only once the shoe is in the hand.

The box is a design surface of its own. It carries the name, the colours and often a lid graphic, and for many buyers it is the first piece of the brand they hold. Names in this category also change hands, move into licensing or return after a gap, so the same mark can appear on very different shoes over the years.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, how its marks and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name carried abroad by licence.

Outside the United States, the brand travels by licence. Wikipedia says Russell Athletic’s European business runs through a licensing agreement between Future Brands Ltd., part of the Batra Group, and Brand Machine Group, and that the brand also operates in Australia, Japan and South Africa. Its brand ambassadors there have included the Olympic swimmer Stephanie Rice and rugby players in England and South Africa, Wikipedia says. Earlier, Wikipedia lists Russell Athletic as kit supplier to several Australian Football League clubs in the early 2000s, including Adelaide, the Brisbane Lions, Fremantle and North Melbourne, and as outfitter to the Harlem Globetrotters from 2010 to 2013.

The Encyclopedia of Alabama traces the company’s growth through plants in south Alabama, northeast Georgia and Florida, and Wikipedia says that after the Second World War it expanded its knitting, weaving, dyeing, finishing and cutting departments and later took manufacturing into Latin America and Scotland. In its 2018 announcement with Augusta Sportswear, Russell Athletic again pointed to the sweatshirt and to generations of outfitting athletes as its legacy.

For a design guide, Russell Athletic shows a name that grew from mill work — knitwear, printed numbers and team kit — into a retail label owned by a larger apparel group. Compare Champion, another American name built on fleece and team wear, and Starter, which made its name on licensed team jackets. For this guide we use varsity navy, a deep mill red and heather grey with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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