One Name, Two Companies

Hamilton Carhartt began making overalls for railroad workers in Detroit in 1889. More than a century later the American company is still doing that: work clothing, sold to people who work, judged on whether it survives the job.

In 1989 a Swiss distributor called Edwin Faeh began bringing American workwear to Europe, and in 1994 established Work In Progress as the exclusive European operation.

Look at the two businesses now. Carhartt WIP has its own designers, its own stores, its own collaborations, its own skate team. Carhartt in the United States has a catalogue aimed at construction sites. The garments are frequently near-identical. The companies are not the same company, and the customers rarely meet.

This is a structural answer to a problem almost every adopted brand faces and almost none solves well.

The problem is that two audiences want the same object for opposite reasons, and any single organisation trying to serve both ends up making a series of small adjustments that please neither. Move towards the new audience and the original one notices the drift. Stay put and the new audience is served by accident, badly, with no shops they want to walk into.

The usual outcome is a brand that quietly becomes a fashion brand while insisting it has not, and loses the credibility that made it worth adopting in the first place.

Two companies, one archive, is a cleaner answer. Neither has to soften itself for the other. The workwear business can keep making a jacket for a cold morning on a site, and the European business can put that same jacket in front of people who want it precisely because it was made for a cold morning on a site.

Compare it to the Miu Miu decision earlier in this subject. Prada built a second brand to carry a second argument. Carhartt let a licensee build a second company around the same clothes. Different mechanisms, identical insight: when you have two things to say, say them under two names rather than blending them into one voice that says neither.

Which leaves the part that requires actual discipline.

Workwear brands get adopted regularly, and the reason is worth stating precisely. They are built to survive rather than to impress. Clothing designed for use carries a credibility that clothing designed to signal credibility never manages, and the honesty is structural rather than moral: nobody was trying to look authentic, because the customer was going to test the thing by Thursday.

The new audience will pay more. That is the offer, it arrives every time, and taking it is how this ends.

Price the working customer out and the credibility goes with them, because it was theirs. It was never the company's to sell. A workwear brand that becomes too expensive for work is a costume, and the people who bought it for what it meant will notice before the accounts do.