Overalls in Greensboro and a name bought with a rival.

Wrangler’s story starts with an overall maker in Greensboro, North Carolina. The company’s own timeline says that C.C. Hudson left a farm in Williamson County, Tennessee, in 1897 to find work in Greensboro’s growing textile trade, where he sewed buttons onto overalls in a factory. When that workplace closed in 1904, the company says, Hudson and his brother Homer bought several of its sewing machines and set up the Hudson Overall Company in a loft above a grocery on South Elm Street.

The business took a new name as it grew. The company says it moved to larger premises in 1919 and became the Blue Bell Overall Company, and that in 1926 it merged with Big Ben Manufacturing of Kentucky, keeping both the Blue Bell name and its Greensboro base. English Wikipedia records that Blue Bell launched Super Big Ben overalls, made from Sanforized fabric treated against shrinking, in 1936.

The Wrangler name arrived through an acquisition. In 1943, according to both the company timeline and English Wikipedia, Blue Bell bought the Casey Jones work-clothes company and, with it, the rights to a little-used Casey Jones brand name: Wrangler. Wikipedia adds that in 1946, as Blue Bell developed a line of jeans for cowboys, its workers took part in a contest to name them, and that the winning entry was Wrangler, the word for a working cowboy.

A Philadelphia tailor, three rodeo riders and a lot number.

For the jeans themselves Blue Bell turned to a Western-wear tailor. The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, in its Suiting the Sound exhibition, describes Bernard “Rodeo Ben” Lichtenstein as a tailor born into a Jewish family in Poland who emigrated with his parents and settled in Philadelphia, where he opened his Rodeo Ben shop in 1930. His customers included rodeo performers and screen cowboys such as Tom Mix, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. The museum says his standing among rodeo champions led a dungaree manufacturer to commission denim jeans made for rodeo competition, and that Rodeo Ben designed what became Wrangler’s Original Cowboy Cut in 1947.

The company dates the launch of its authentic western jeans to 1947 and says three professional rodeo cowboys, Jim Shoulders, Bill Linderman and Freckles Brown, wear-tested the style and endorsed the Wrangler name. That style is the 13MWZ. Wikipedia explains the code as the thirteenth version of men’s western jeans with a zipper; its timeline says the style was first sold as lot 11MWZ and renumbered 13MWZ in 1952 to match the weight of its denim, while the company timeline uses 13MWZ from 1947. Wikipedia lists the construction details Blue Bell built in for riders: felled outseams and inseams, rear pockets placed for the saddle, rivets covered against scratching, a zip fly, and a strong tack in place of a crotch rivet.

Rodeo has stayed at the centre of the brand. The company says Shoulders signed on as an official endorsee in 1948, and both the company and Wikipedia record that the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association officially endorsed Wrangler jeans in 1974. The company marked an anniversary of the 13MWZ in 1997, and Wikipedia notes a collectors’ edition made for the occasion.

The brand also travelled. Blue Bell opened a plant in Belgium in 1962 and launched Wrangler in Europe, the company and Wikipedia both say; in 1983, Wikipedia records, Wrangler sponsored the English football club Nottingham Forest. At home, the company says, Wrangler became the primary sponsor of the racing driver Dale Earnhardt in 1981, whose blue-and-yellow car was known as the “Wrangler Jean Machine,” and in 1992 it supplied clothing for the cast of the George Strait film Pure Country.

Design and documentation.

A pair of jeans carries its brand in a handful of small places rather than across one large surface. The stitched shape on a back pocket, the patch sewn above it on the waistband, the buttons and rivets at the stress points and the woven tab or label at a seam are the parts a shopper can recognise from across a room, long before a logo is close enough to read.

Each of those places works differently as identity. Back-pocket stitching is drawn in thread, so it reads as a line and a silhouette rather than as a word. A waistband patch, in leather, card or a printed substitute, is where a name, a symbol and sometimes a picture sit together, much like a small label. Metal hardware is stamped, so it holds lettering in relief at a very small size. Advertising then sets all of this in motion, giving a name a voice, a slogan and a setting.

Each guide in this group looks at those parts in turn — who started the brand, who owns it now, how its marks and advertising have been recorded — and keeps what independent sources document apart from what the company says about itself.

From Blue Bell to VF to Kontoor.

Ownership changed in two steps. Blue Bell merged with the VF Corporation of Pennsylvania in 1986, according to the company and Wikipedia. In 1994, the company says, Wrangler moved into a new world headquarters on North Elm Street in downtown Greensboro. Wikipedia records that VF announced in 2018 that it would separate its jeans business; on 23 May 2019 VF said it had completed the separation of its jeanswear organisation into Kontoor Brands, an independent public company carrying Wrangler, Lee, Rock & Republic and the VF Outlet business, Textile World reported. Kontoor Brands, headquartered in Greensboro, has owned Wrangler since 2019. On 21 May 2026 Kontoor announced an agreement to sell its Lee business to Authentic Brands Group, saying it would focus on Wrangler and Helly Hansen.

Production has moved with the business. Wikipedia records that Wrangler began making jeans in Mexico in 2001 and that its last sewing plant in the United States closed in 2005.

The marks on the jeans carry the brand as much as the name does. The back pocket is the clearest case: World IP Review noted in December 2011 that Wrangler had been using a W-shaped stitched pattern on its back pockets for decades. Advertising has leaned on the West and on riding: Wikipedia lists the “Whatever You Ride” television campaign of 2000 and the “There’s a bit of the West in all of us” campaign of 2002, and a European print campaign called “Wanted” in 2004, the year the brand also issued a limited collection under the Blue Bell name that reproduced its earliest jeans. Later lines named by the company include the Twenty X western jeans of 1994 and Riggs Workwear of 2003.

For a design guide, Wrangler shows how a workwear company can build a lasting brand from a name it bought, a tailor’s pattern and a rodeo endorsement, then carry it through new owners. Compare Lee, its stablemate at Kontoor, and Levi’s, another American jeans maker known by its back-pocket stitching. For this guide we use denim indigo, saddle tan and rope yellow with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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