The North Face

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The North Face is an outdoor product manufacturing company. It specializes in jackets, fleecewear, luggage, and shoes, designed to withstand the forces of nature, and the clothing and equipment lines are catered towards climbers, mountaineers, skiers, snowboarders, and hikers.

The clothing line is famous for its use on mountaineering expeditions on Mt. Everest and in other extreme outdoor activities. As The North Face has increased in popularity recently, it has become somewhat infamous for its trade in counterfeiting circles and its increase in theft, which may have resulted from the clothing line's high prices.

History and The North Face Logo

The North Face brand was established in 1966, in San Francisco. At that time, Douglas Tompkins created an equipment retail store that eventually acquired the current name "The North Face". This name was chosen because the north face of a mountain in the northern hemisphere is generally the steepest, coldest, and most difficult face to climb. By the 1980s, skiwear was added to the line of products, and eventually camping equipment was added as well. The North Face is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the VF Corporation. Tompkins sold the business in 1968, and he and his wife, Susie Russell (now Susie Tompkins Buell), began the ESPRIT clothing brand.

The North Face's easily recognizable logo consists of a slightly skewed quarter-circle with two lines running within it. This image is supposedly an interpretation of the famous Half Dome rock formation in Yosemite National Park. Adjacent to the symbol are the words THE NORTH FACE embroidered in large block letters.

Rise in Popularity, Counterfeiting, and Theft

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, The North Face became a well known brand and its popularity, especially among youth and college students, increased substantially. One may walk around college campuses in even the most temperate environments and see students wearing various styles of North Face jackets. This popularity may be attributed, in part, to the fact that hip hop stars were often seen wearing North Face jackets in music videos. An upper-end North Face winter jacket currently costs about $500 USD. Due to the high demand for and the high prices of these products, a market developed for counterfeit (illegally replicated) North Face goods. Non-genuine North Face items, which are often sold on eBay or in other nonregulated venues, can usually be detected by their misplacement of logos and the obvious inferiority of craftsmanship. In addition to this, many non-genuine The North Face products are clearly not made of Gore-Tex, despite being so marked.

For the same reasons that North Face products are counterfeited, these items may also be stolen. In early 2005, a group of teenagers from Washington D.C. was arrested on charges including the armed robbery of specifically North Face jackets from randomly picked students on the street[link]. Allegedly, the thieves would then resell the products for a substantially decreased price.

External links

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