Forever 21 History

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The Company Description of Its Time

Forever 21's historical record is a growth story told in store sizes, and it begins at the smallest possible scale: it all began in a 900 square foot shop on Figueroa Street in Los Angeles on April 21, 1984. The store was called Fashion 21. By the end of the first year, sales had risen from $35,000 to $700,000. The founder reinvested his success by opening new stores every six months, eventually changing the name to Forever 21. In 1989, Forever 21 opened its 11th store and the first store located in a mall, and multiplied its presence by expanding the average size to 5,000 square feet per store, running specialty stores in major mall locations nationwide. Mall of Americas, Miami, Florida was the first store outside of California, in 1995; adding new stores every six months, Forever 21 had reached a total of 40 stores by 1997.

The 2015 Summary and the Trivia

The historical record closes with a dated summary this page preserves with its date attached: Summary 2015 - with a goal to become an $8 billion company by 2017 and open 600 stores in the next three years, it would be exciting to see the company achieve in three years what it initially took 30 years to do. Forever 21 is the 5th largest specialty retailer in the United States. The average Forever 21 store is 38,000 square feet; the largest is approximately 162,000 square feet; and the historical record Fashion 21 store is only 900 square feet. The arc in three numbers - 900, 38,000, 162,000 - is the whole biography of the company as recorded, from a Figueroa Street shop to flagships the size of department stores. And after all of it, the filing insists: even with the company's tremendous growth, it still remains a family owned business.

The historical record's trivia is part of the record too, and too good to drop: a customer from Toronto named her daughter Tiev Forever Golding because she almost had her baby in a Forever 21 store; once the child's passport expires, they plan to legally change her first name to 'Forever'. The filing also notes that the prior three businesses that occupied the historical record Fashion 21 building failed within the first year - the $700,000 first year happened in a shop where three predecessors had died. The one photograph, a 2015 store image, is carried by reference in the gallery on the history page. Set beside Fashion Nova's profile in this letter - another Los Angeles value-fashion ascent, built a generation later on Instagram instead of mall flagships - the two pages bracket the changing machinery of fast fashion growth.

Photos

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