Ralph Lauren Corporation

Ralph Lauren Corporation is the New York luxury and lifestyle company founded by Ralph Lauren in 1967 — as Polo Ralph Lauren, the name it carried until 2011 — which designs, markets and distributes premium and luxury products in apparel, home, accessories and fragrances under a family of brands from Chaps and Lauren to Polo Ralph Lauren and the Ralph Lauren Purple Label. The company trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol RL. Its wholesale business, supplying department and specialty stores worldwide with shop-in-shop presentations of the Ralph Lauren world, remains one of the largest designer wholesale operations in the industry, alongside its own stores, concessions and digital flagships.

Company Profile

The February 2020 summary's phrasing — a global leader in the design, marketing and distribution of premium lifestyle products — understates the model's distinctiveness: Ralph Lauren sells a complete, internally consistent world (the clothing, the home goods, the restaurant, the coffee shop) at price levels a customer can enter at a Chaps shirt and climb for a lifetime. Wholesale partners buy into that ladder, not merely into garments.

The company's own record stresses brand elevation as its continuing strategy: fewer, better wholesale doors, tighter distribution and higher average prices, after the over-distribution that had diluted the labels in earlier decades. Read against the Polo page in this section, the two pages are one company's before and after — the same enterprise, renamed for the wider family it had become.

The range behind the name is apparel, home products, accessories and fragrances under Ralph Lauren, Polo Ralph Lauren, Lauren, RRL and Chaps. Its customers are wholesale department and specialty stores, the company's own stores and concessions, and digital customers worldwide. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Ralph Lauren Corporation 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 Ralph Lauren Corporation 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 — Operating — 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 Ralph Lauren Corporation 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: operating.