These Brands Sold One Thing. Then They Changed Completely

A few weeks ago, Walmart announced the relaunch of Secret Treasures, its $1 billion sleepwear brand. The revamped line will feature trendier styles and even sell under a new brand name: Joyspun. The sleepwear category, said evp of apparel and private brands Denise Incandela, is “undergoing a significant transformation,” and it only made sense that Walmart “evolve and grow” along with it. Nothing new about that, right? Changing tastes and market forces push brands to reinvent themselves all the time. Usually, however, brands evolve within familiar boundaries, changing just enough to stay fresh but not so much that shoppers can’t recognize them. Every so often, however, a brand does a literal metamorphosis: It becomes something entirely different from what it was originally. The process happens in stages. It often takes decades. But the results prove that changing with the times is always a good idea, even if it means changing into something else. Chock Full o’ Nuts Originally: A nut shop in Times SquareToday: A national brand of supermarket coffee How it happened: William Black starts roasting nuts in a store at Broadway and 43rd Street in 1926, catering to the theater crowd with inexpensive snacks. In a short time, he expanded his operation to 18 locations. But the onset of the Great Depression forced Black to switch up his business plan. Using his roasters for coffee beans instead of nuts, he built lunch counters in his stores and offered the best meal deal in town: a sandwich and a cup of coffee for a nickel. Black’s robust roast quickly gained the reputation as New York’s hometown coffee, making Chock Full O’ Nuts locations a prefiguration of Starbucks. The brand began appearing in grocery stores in 1955 and, as the ascendance of fast food began to force Chock Full O’ Nuts to shutter its restaurants, the retail coffee business became the brand’s sole presence. (It’s still sometimes called the “Heavenly Coffee,” a line from the brand’s 1961 jingle sung by Page Morgan Black, the founder’s wife.) Today, the brand generates some $610 million in annual retail sales. Contrary to a common assumption, the coffee doesn’t contain nuts and never did. Banana Republic Originally: An army surplus shop and safari-style outfitterToday: An upscale apparel chain How it happened: If you were around in the early 1980s, you probably remember the short-lived craze over safari attire. Thanks to movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Romancing the Stone (1984), Americans suddenly wanted to go bushwhacking in the Peruvian jungle—or at least look like they could. But where could you luck into a Yucatan shirt, a leather bandolier and pith helmet? At Banana Republic. The original Banana Republic, anyway. In 1978, entrepreneur Mel Ziegler and his wife started Banana Republic as a single store in Hollywood that sold exotic surplus attire: rubber rain boots, cargo pants, fur-trimmed flight jackets. The store was a literal jungle, complete with a life-sized elephant model, an old Army jeep and a Quonset hut for the footwear department. When Gap founder Don Fisher bought Banana Republic in 1983, the corporate cash infusion saw the store expand to malls across America. To stock so many shelves, the Zieglers eased off surplus goods and instead used select vintage clothing as templates for new apparel. But in 1987, the stock market crashed—hard. To revive its fortunes, the Gap hired Mickey Drexler—who would change Banana Republic virtually overnight. Convinced that the safari craze was tapped out, Drexler gutted the stores and remade them as modernist emporiums for business-casual attire. And that’s what Banana Republic still is. Shinola Originally: A shoe polishToday: A luxury lifestyle purveyor How it happened: There’s a classic scene from the 1979 Carl Reiner movie The Jerk in which Navin R. Johnson (Steve Martin) gets an important life lesson from his father: the difference between shit and Shinola. The scene was funnier 43 years ago because, back then, people actually knew what Shinola was—a brand of shoe polish. Developed in 1877 by chemist George Melancthon Wetmore in Rochester, N.Y., Shinola (the original spelling was Shinol’a) was such a robust polish that the U.S. Army made it standard issue for soldiers to shine their boots. As the decades passed, the brand moved through a series of owners until finally shutting down in 1960. The brand name would lay dormant for half a century. Tom Kartsotis was a ticket scalper-turned-importer of inexpensive watches made in Hong Kong. After a perusal of old issues of Life magazine turned him on to the postwar aesthetic, Kartsotis founded Fossil. The brand resurrected functional minimalism in the form of mid-priced wristwatches and made Kartsotis a fortune. Cash in hand, Kartsotis bought the long-dormant Shinola trade name in 2011. Then he packaged it as a revivalist brand of classic American home goods—clocks, knives, bicycles, leather goods. Shinola goods rest on heritage, even if that heritage is only a decade old. Oh, and shoe polish? It’s not among the offerings. RH Originally: A hardware storeToday: A luxury home-furnishings and travel brand How it happened: If you have a hankering for, say, an Italian slope-arm U-chaise sectional sofa in Veneto smoke leather with an oak base (and are possessed of the $10,195 to buy it), then the nearest RH gallery is where you must go. But this arcadia of mid-century modernism was nothing like that just a quarter century ago, when RH began as Restoration Hardware. Opened in 1979 by psychologist-turned-bartender Stephen Gordon, Restoration Hardware really did sell hardware at first—hard-to-find historical metal that people restoring an old house (as Gordon was) would need. In 1994, Gordon added the gadgetry that would make the place famous: Slinkies and aluminum lunchboxes, oil lanterns and bicycle repair kits. “Like Ralph Lauren,” the said The New York Times in 1997, “Restoration Hardware is attempting to elicit an emotional response by elevating and reinterpreting familiar but forgotten objects.” But all of that began to change in 2001, when former Williams-Sonoma president Gary Friedman assumed the CEO’s chair. In a metamorphosis that took the better part of a decade, Friedman shifted Restoration Hardware from a folksy, retro brand into a lifestyle emporium for the six- (or seven-) figure homeowner. Leather art deco club chairs, crystal torchères and steamer trunk coffee tables took over the stores, which grew darker, plusher and more exclusive. By 2012, Restoration Hardware dropped its name in favor of RH. And starting around 2015, when RH started building freestanding “galleries”—60,000 square-foot meccas to European minimalism—the transformation was complete. Today, “the world’s leading luxury home furnishing purveyor,” as RH bills itself, even includes rooftop restaurants and a private jet for charter. Nintendo Originally: A playing-card companyToday: A video game company How it happened: In 1889, a Kyoto entrepreneur named Fusajiro Yamauchi went into business manufacturing Hanafuda, the traditional playing cards of Japan. Smaller than its western counterpart, the 48-card Hanafuda deck featured an array of flowers and plants since the government forbade numbered cards in an effort to discourage gambling. Paper playing cards would remain Nintendo’s core business for the next 84 years. In 1973, Nintendo made its first foray outside its core offering with something called the Laser Clay Shooting System. Players took turns using a light gun to aim and shoot at various targets on a projection screen. The game was analog, wonky and short lived—but it opened the company up to the promise of electronics. Four years later, the company introduced TV Game 15—essentially a clone of Atari’s Pong that people played on their color televisions at home. But as pinball parlors evolved into video game arcades in the U.S., Nintendo jumped the Pacific and got serious about programming. In 1981, the company had its first hit with Donkey Kong and never looked back. Mario Brothers arrived in 1985 and, five years later, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System put arcade-quality gaming into the living room. Today, The Legend of Zelda, Animal Crossing and the seemingly inexhaustible variants of Mario have built Nintendo into a company that does $15 billion in annual sales. In point of fact, Nintendo still makes playing cards (and yes, they’re on Amazon). But, as a sign of how dramatically the company’s changed, many of the decks now feature Nintendo’s video game characters.