Coach

Coach is the New York leather-goods house founded in 1941 as a family-run workshop in a Manhattan loft, where six artisans handcrafted leather goods with skills handed down from generation to generation — the company behind the modern luxury handbag business in America. Coach, Inc. traded on the New York Stock Exchange as COH from its 2000 offering until October 31, 2017, when the company — by then also owner of Stuart Weitzman and Kate Spade — renamed itself Tapestry, Inc. and took the symbol TPR. Coach remains Tapestry's largest brand, selling handbags, accessories, footwear, ready-to-wear, jewellery, travel bags, sunwear and watches worldwide. In August 2025 Tapestry sold Stuart Weitzman to Caleres, the former Brown Shoe Company profiled in this section.

Company Profile

The October 2013 summary in the record describes Coach at its single-brand peak: a marketer of accessories and gifts for women and men, its range running from handbags and small leather goods to footwear, wearables, jewellery, travel bags, sunwear and watches. The 2004 summary reaches back to the founding — the Manhattan loft, the six artisans, and the reputation for quality and craftsmanship that discerning consumers sought out.

The Tapestry renaming followed the holding-company logic this guide records elsewhere: once Coach the company owned other houses, Coach the name could no longer carry the group. The stock record is continuous — COH and TPR are one listing under two names — and the handbag brand at its centre is unchanged by the corporate sign above it.

The range behind the name is handbags, accessories, footwear, ready-to-wear, jewellery, travel bags, sunwear and watches. Its customers are luxury customers worldwide, through Coach stores and coach.com. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Coach in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing Coach with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

For current dealings, the snapshot at the top of this page is the place to start: it gives the company's present status — Renamed — Coach, Inc. became Tapestry, Inc. on October 31, 2017; the Coach brand continues as Tapestry's largest brand and the same listing trades as TPR — and links to the official website, which is where current product ranges, store information and investor or corporate contacts are maintained. Anything in the dated summaries that conflicts with the snapshot should be read as the older position: summaries describe the year they are dated, and the snapshot describes the company as it stands now.

Company summaries of this kind were the working tool of the apparel trade as much as of investors: a buyer, landlord or supplier checking Coach could see its scale, its headquarters and its own description of its business in a few paragraphs. Those dated descriptions are kept with their dates, because a store count from 2013 or a strategy statement from 2019 is evidence about that year, not about today. The current position is the one given in the snapshot: renamed.