Born in 1899, Eddie Bauer grew up living off the land in the Pacific Northwest. After a childhood spent outdoors and six years of experience selling sporting goods at a local store in downtown Seattle, Bauer opened his own retail business at the age of 20. The first sign of his innate marketing talent was his offer of an unconditional money-back guarantee for any equipment he sold, which was well ahead of its time.
He also had a gift for advertising, and he built trust by personifying the brand itself. Bauer made a name for himself in Washington as an accomplished marksman. Along with his wife, Christine Heltborg, whom he wed in 1929, he won state competitions in the individual and couples categories for shooting clay pigeons, all while wearing patches prominently displaying the Eddie Bauer name. The duo’s victories were covered in the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer, spreading his name as he came to inhabit ever-larger retail spaces.
But it wasn’t until a near-fatal outing in 1935 that Bauer began to design the jacket that would make his name known far outside of Seattle. Bauer was returning from a fishing trip in the Olympic Peninsula when freezing rain caught him far from shelter. His clothing soaked and icing over, Bauer began to feel drowsy, the early signs of hypothermia. He fired off three rifle shots to signal a friend hiking far in front of him and then fell asleep against a tree. He wrote later that he would’ve been “a goner if my partner hadn’t come along.”
Remembering a story his uncle told him, in which a down-lined coat saved him from the cold during the Russo-Japanese War, he set to work on a down jacket for the cold of the Pacific Northwest. In 1940, he patented his design for the first Skyliner jacket, which he claims was the first visibly quilted down insulated outdoor apparel garment in the US. According to the patent, for 14 years Bauer held the exclusive rights to produce the diamond pattern of the Skyliner, which he later expanded to 10 other design patterns for quilted clothing, effectively making him the exclusive seller of quilted down jackets until the 1960s. While the iconic pattern ensured that everyone knew it was from Eddie Bauer, the jacket became popular for being lightweight but extremely warm due to its revolutionary use of down.
In 1942, as part of the war effort, Bauer provided thousands of flying suits, and later sleeping bags, for servicemen stationed in Alaska and Europe. Business was booming, but Bauer’s use of expensive, specialized machinery for wartime production, along with re-negotiated contracts for his work, led to a low point for the company, and for Bauer personally. “He was running three shifts a day, seven days a week, so he was physically way over expended, as well as economically,” said Berg. “By the end of the war, even though he made all of these pieces and built a tremendous amount of reputation, the economics turned out that he wasn’t particularly profitable.”
However, these round-the-clock efforts eventually turned Eddie Bauer into a national brand, even if indirectly. GIs returning from the war had experienced firsthand the quality of Eddie Bauer’s products and knew exactly where they were made because of the tag sewn into every garment. The soldiers began writing to Bauer from all over the nation, helping to spur the huge mail-order catalogue business the company became known for. Unlike today’s catalogues, they included a personal, signed letter from Bauer, and the first few pages were written to educate consumers about the benefits of goose down and the ethos of the company.
Up until 1950s, Eddie Bauer was associated with hunters, fishermen and outdoorsmen, but it was time to become “Expedition Outfitters.” A team of eight American mountaineers, three of them from Seattle, came to Eddie in the fall of 1952 with a request for a mountaineering down parka. The best in the world were made in France, and the group wanted an American-made parka for their attempt at the first ascent of K2, the world’s second-tallest mountain. The resulting jacket was named the Kara Koram, after the mountain range, and became known for its life-saving quality after the team failed to reach the top due to disastrous weather but showed great heroism in saving all but one climber’s life, including a save infamously known as “The Belay.” The group and Bauer’s equipment became known worldwide.
The rest of the 1950s were characterized by continued attempts at first ascents, and the Kara Koram was used all over the world. It wasn’t until 1958 that an American team, clad in Eddie Bauer down, made the first ascent of one of the world’s fourteen 8000-meter peaks, Gasherbrum I, and they summited the peak wearing another Bauer innovation: down parkas with ripstop nylon. The material had been used in sleeping bags for 2-3 years and, at the suggestion of the climbing team, Bauer used it as the outer shell of his parka to keep the weight low but maintain durability. This material was then used in the most extreme parka ever made by Bauer, the Mt. Everest Parka, in 1963.
The year 1971 marked a drastic turning point for the company. The same year an Eddie Bauer team summited Everest for the third time, and three years after Eddie retired, the company was sold to General Mills, and it was the beginning of a three-decade-long redirection of the company’s legacy. “By the ’80s the leadership that came in had MBAs, they were trained merchants, not outdoorsmen,” said Berg. “Retail space was starting to move out of downtown shopping districts into suburban malls, where the style of retailer is more homogenous.”
In 1988, Spiegel, Inc. acquired Eddie Bauer and continued the movement to focus on customers who remained indoors. Eddie Bauer no longer sold hunting or fishing equipment. It no longer outfitted mountaineering expeditions. Instead it developed the All Week Long and Eddie Bauer Home lines, abandoning tent sales and the Sports Shop to save retail space. A short bout of success was followed by a decline in sales, and Eddie Bauer was taken over by Eddie Bauer Holdings in 2005. For the first time in 35 years, Eddie Bauer was an independent company. This marked the dawn of a new era, one defined by a movement back to the roots, and a proud representation of the brand’s heritage.
Under new CEO leadership in 2007, Eddie Bauer started a top-secret mission called Project Summit. The company assembled a guide team to help build gear that would be used by world-class climbers, along with novices. In May 2009, accompanied by a film crew, Eddie Bauer’s guide team climbed Mount Everest completely outfitted in the new series, First Ascent, the first public debut of Project Summit and a relaunch of the company as a world-class mountaineering outfitter.
If the response from the outdoor world is any indication, First Ascent proved to be more than just a well-executed marketing stunt. In its first five years, the new gear line won 13 industry best-in-class awards and completed 53 pioneering expeditions strapped onto the backs and hands of world-class guides and explorers. Last year, this magazine included Eddie Bauer’s Sorcerer Pack in our GP100 awards, while Men’s Journal also awarded the pack their 2014 Gear of the Year Award.
