Gap Inc.: Launch Of Old Navy

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Gap was first founded and launched by Don Fischer and his wife Doris in San Francisco in 1969. The store was launched when Don a real estate developer, saw the increasing popularity of jeans and the need for a better range and offerings for people. He opened the first store with an age range of his clients going to be from 14 to 25 years old and this is where he took the name ‘generation gap’.
Fischer built the original store around one product, Levi Jeans, offering a larger selection of sizes and styles than the consumer could get anywhere else.
Gap was an immediate success and the Fischers began to expand to other locations and with over 204 stores it was a publicly traded company by 1975. The initial Gap store was built around supplying …show more content…

By 1999 all the sites were rolled out with ecommerce capabilities. “Gap only launched a web property when all of the key business drivers were brought in-house.” (McIntyre and Perlman, …show more content…

bringing all of the business drivers in house before launch so they could control all the systems they implemented internally. This was evident when they refused to roll out the launch of Old Navy as it did not reach the high standard that Gap had come accustomed to, similar was the roll out of the international website. The website was designed with the intention of providing the consumer with a shopping experience allowing them to select and compare garments, add their preferences and other options. Shopping online offered the customer the same policies as in the retail store which included returns, alterations, trusted brands, but added to the service by being able to pre shop and also offering in-store promotions. This was of course beneficial to Gap as they were now able to collect customer information such as addresses, site access times, the length of there visit how regular they made purchases, product types and how much they spent. This valuable information was not available to Gap in the retail store. It allowed Gap to offer customer’s more incentives and discounts for them to spend money all the while increasing the market share of Gap.
On-line shopping was treated as a separate division and Gap developed specific warehouses and customer support services to operate this unit. “The development of the online unit saw the accompanying launch of the companies first 800 number and the build out of a full scale call center manned

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