The North Face

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The North Face, Inc.
Image:Logo The North Face.jpg
Type	Subsidiary
Founded	1968
Headquarters	San Leandro, CA
Industry	retail
Products	clothing outdoor gear
Parent	VF Corp.
Slogan	Never Stop Exploring
Website	www.thenorthface.com

The North Face, Inc. is an outdoor product company specializing in outerwear, fleece, footwear, and equipment. The clothing and equipment lines are catered towards Wilderness chic, climbers, mountaineers, skiers, snowboarders, hikers, and endurance athletes.

The clothing line is known for its use on mountaineering expeditions on Mt. Everest as well as other outdoor activities and as fashion apparel.

1 History of The North Face
2 Rise in popularity, counterfeiting, and theft
- 2.1 "The North Face Guru"
3 Products
4 References
5 External links

[edit] History of The North Face

The North Face brand was established in 1968, in San Francisco, California, when Douglas Tompkins and Kenneth "Hap" Klopp 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.

Today, The North Face is based in San Leandro, California, near its corporate sibling, JanSport.^[1] JanSport is the world's largest backpack maker, and together, JanSport and The North Face sell nearly half of all small backpacks sold in the United States.^[1]

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.

[edit] Rise in popularity, counterfeiting, and theft

In the late 1990s and early 2000s with the rise of wilderness chic, The North Face became a well-known brand and its popularity, especially among youth and college students, increased substantially. An upper-end The 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) The North Face goods. Non-genuine The 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 or HyVent, despite being so marked.

For the same reasons that The North Face products are counterfeited, they are also prime targets for theft. In early 2005, a group of teenagers from Washington D.C. were arrested on charges including the armed robbery of specifically The North Face jackets from randomly picked students on the street^[2]. Allegedly, the thieves would then resell the products for a substantially decreased price. This increase in counterfeiting prompted a college student to create a web site called thenorthfaceguru.com to warn users about such items.

[edit] "The North Face Guru"

Originally created during the winter of 2004 by a college student aggravated by a purchase of a counterfeit The North Face item. He used the web space provided by his ISP and made a crude site. He wanted to educate consumers on how to shop smart, particularly online. As a result the site was born. The previous version was extremely crude and basic, but it got the point across. After implementing a forum system, the site grew exponentially.

On March 26, 2006 a new version was launched with Whitelist and Blacklist sections to report the good and bad E-Bay vendors. And most importantly, a better layout.^[3]

Recently in 2007, Businessweek interviewed the owner and featured the site in one of their articles. ^[4]

[edit] Products

The North Face's product range includes clothing, footwear, rucksacks, tents, and sleeping bags. Among their best-known products [1] are the VE25 tent and the Denali fleece jacket.