Coach

Coach began in 1941 as a family-run workshop in a loft on West 34th Street in Manhattan, where six leatherworkers made wallets and billfolds by hand. In 1946 Miles Cahn and his wife, Lillian, joined the business, and they later bought it. Miles noticed how a baseball glove grew softer and richer with use, and he developed a way of treating leather so that it would age in the same way. Lillian suggested they make women's handbags from it, and the first Coach bags, sturdy, simple and built to last, appeared in the early 1960s.

In 1962 the Cahns hired Bonnie Cashin, a pioneer of American sportswear, to design for them. Over a decade she introduced bright colours, side pockets and, most lastingly, the brass turnlock hardware inspired by the fastenings on her convertible car's roof, a detail that remains a Coach signature. Bags such as her Cashin Carry made the label a quiet favourite of working American women.

The Cahns sold Coach to the Sara Lee Corporation in 1985. Under Lew Frankfort, chief executive from the mid-1980s, and Reed Krakoff, who became creative director in 1996, Coach turned itself into "accessible luxury", introducing the signature C monogram fabric, expanding into shoes and outerwear and building a large network of stores and outlets in North America and Asia. Sara Lee spun Coach off with a stock-market listing in 2000, and by the late 2000s it was one of the most profitable handbag businesses in the world, though heavy discounting dulled its image.

The British designer Stuart Vevers, previously at Loewe, became executive creative director in 2013 with a mandate to turn Coach into a fashion brand. He drew on American nostalgia, Western wear, varsity jackets and the house archive, launched ready-to-wear shows in New York and revived archival bags, most successfully the Tabby, introduced in 2019. Under his direction the brand has found a younger audience; the reissued Brooklyn and Empire bags followed, and the Coachtopia sub-brand, launched in 2023, works with recycled and offcut materials.

The company bought the shoemaker Stuart Weitzman in 2015 and Kate Spade in 2017, and that year renamed itself Tapestry, Inc. A planned acquisition of Capri Holdings, owner of Michael Kors and Versace, was abandoned in 2024 after a US court sided with competition regulators. Coach remains Tapestry's largest brand and its creative anchor, still trading on leather that improves with age.