Orvis History

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The Company Description of Its Time

For more than 150 years, the Orvis name has stood for outdoor traditions, quality, and customer satisfaction. In 1856, Charles Orvis founded the Orvis Company in Manchester, Vermont, offering the finest fly fishing equipment, and priding himself on customer satisfaction and service. Today, along with its world famous fly-fishing gear, Orvis offers distinctive clothing, home furnishings, gifts, and dog products. Each item is rooted in a heritage of authenticity and the outdoors, and is backed with a no-questions-asked guarantee. That guarantee is the profile's load-bearing claim: a retailer selling rods, waders and field clothing to people who use them hard is promising that satisfaction, not the sale, is the end of the transaction.

Stores, Outlets and More Than 500 Dealers

The profile organises the Orvis world into three kinds of places, and the distinctions matter to a shopper. Orvis company-owned retail stores offer a full line of men's and women's clothing, the world's foremost fly fishing gear, furniture, gifts, pet items, and more, including the newest Orvis Destinations Stores, with 12,000 to 23,000 square feet of what the company calls the Orvis Distinctive Country Lifestyle experience. Orvis Outlet Stores promise great deals of up to 70% off at all times across clothing, home furnishings, pet items, gifts and fly fishing gear, with Orvis Warehouse Sales providing even greater savings at selected locations around the country.

The third channel is the widest. More than 500 Orvis authorized dealers throughout the world focus on fly fishing: one-stop fly fishing dealers offering expert advice, local reports, rods, reels, waders, vests, flies and more, each backed by the Orvis 100% guarantee, alongside men's and women's clothing, gifts and pet items. Beyond the shops, the filing points readers to world-renowned endorsed lodges, guides, guide services and outfitters. Taken with the store count kept below, the picture is a specialist's network rather than a conventional chain: a Vermont flagship, dozens of owned stores, and hundreds of independent dealers whose local water knowledge is itself part of the product.

Catalogue Roots and the 2009 Snapshot

Orvis is much more than mail order, the filing insists, while honouring the channel that built it: millions of loyal and longtime customers receive Orvis catalogs each year. The dated snapshot that closes the profile - marked in the historical record as based on year 2009 info, and kept here with that date attached - counts more than 44 Orvis Retail Stores in the U.S. and the UK, and more than 500 Orvis dealers worldwide who sell and service the Orvis product line. The Orvis website, it adds, offers the widest range of its award-winning products for men's and women's clothing, fishing, home, dogs, hunting, and sales, arranged for easy browsing and ordering with updated, in-depth product information.

For a directory researcher, the useful discipline is to quote this profile in its own layers: the 1856 founding by Charles Orvis in Manchester, Vermont, which is permanent history; the guarantee, the 5% conservation commitment and the three-channel store structure, which are the company's stated way of doing business; and the 44-store count, which belongs to 2009 and should never be quoted without its year. One filing quirk is also kept honestly below: the historical record page's cross-reference labelled Orvis profile leads to the Oxford Industries filing in this same letter, exactly as Apparel Search filed it, and this rebuild carries that link unchanged.

← Back to the current Orvis profile