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Within URBN, the damage has led to “some soul-searching moments about how the world changes,” says Oona McCullough, director of investor relations.

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But the company has stumbled recently into a seemingly endless series of PR disasters - blasted on social media and in the press for selling a string of offensive products, for being “a company that is bad for women and members of the gay community” (according to Mic, a news site for millennials), and for allegedly violating the trademarks of a sovereign Native American nation. Five or six years ago, this story couldn’t have existed.

In fact, it has never liked to talk about itself in the broad sense. It’s not Comcast, which puts its name on everything and is ingrained in our civic life and also in the public imagination of what it means to be a Philly company. Yet there’s also a distance between the company and its hometown. Before there was a tech scene here, before designers and coders packed co-working spaces and musicians built studios in Fishtown, URBN brought creative talent to Philly. Most of the decisions on product mix, store footprint, visual identity and business strategy have been made in this city, by artists and marketers and executives who are either from the region or were lured from other places, including fashion capitals like New York and L.A. The company’s products are some of our widest-reaching cultural exports, and by any measure, URBN is one of Philly’s great business success stories.

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URBN generated more than $3.4 billion in sales last year across more than 500 stores, plus online and wholesale.

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Free People sells bohemian clothes for younger women Terrain sells garden planters and outdoor furniture and a $2,498 steel fire pit it describes as a “rustic cauldron.” (To avoid confusion between the overall company, Urban Outfitters, Inc., and Urban Outfitters the brand, I’ll use “URBN” to mean the company - URBN being its stock-ticker symbol and also the four giant black letters blazoned on the side of its recently completed distribution center for online orders that sprawls across 1.1 million square feet in the town of Gap, in Pennsylvania Dutch country.) The brand known as Anthropologie offers a mix of fashion and housewares to adventurous women ages 28 to 45. There’s the eponymous Urban Outfitters, which markets clothes and vinyl and rebellion to men and women ages 18 to 28. The Navy Yard has been transformed by one of Philadelphia’s largest and most iconic companies, Urban Outfitters, Inc., the retailer that started here in 1970 with a single store and is now a $3.4 billion global empire, a family of lifestyle brands that ring the world. Dogs snooze on pillows beneath the desks of women - more women than men now.Ī dog lounges next to a Free People employee | Photograph by Christopher Leaman A stone Buddha keeps watch over the fish. But the pits where crews once bent steam pipes have been converted to koi ponds. The old buildings still stand today, and there are still thousands of workers inside.

Wrote one supervisor in 1943, “The dirt blackens their faces and eats into their pores the fumes choke their throats and smart their eyes, but the girls can take it and they do.” Sixteen percent of the employees were women, including hundreds of “girl welders” who climbed the towering scaffolds of the skeletal ships and manipulated steel with hacksaws and torches. Navy, toiling in a waterfront cluster of hot, noisy, cavernous brick buildings, some of which were painted dull gray and shielded to prevent leaking light from revealing their location to enemy bombers. At the yard’s peak during the Second World War, nearly 60,000 craftspeople and laborers jammed together each day to make cruisers, destroyers, battleships and aircraft carriers for the U.S. Even after construction crews filled the back channel to glue the dot to the mainland, the Navy Yard remained an island in spirit and function, a city unto itself. The main corridor in Building 18, Anthropologie’s headquarters | Photograph by Christopher LeamanĪmerica’s original naval shipyard is in Philadelphia, at the southern tip of the city, where the Schuylkill River meets the Delaware - 900 acres that were once a literal island, a teardrop of land floating at the bottom of the city like a dot on an exclamation point.

Urban empire sweats sizing