Loyalists unhappy as Coach becomes Tapestry Inc

Reuters: Iconic luxury handbag maker Coach Inc risked Wall Street and social media ire last week by announcing a change of its corporate name to Tapestry Inc, as it evolves into a multi-brand upscale retailer.

The company’s shares fell as much as 3% in early trading, which analysts attributed to strong results from rival LVMH, and to a broader selloff in the consumer discretionary space.

Still, social media reacted harshly to the 76-year old company changing its well-known corporate identity with many Twitter users criticising the decision that calls for Tapestry being the holding entity that houses the Coach, Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman brands. “This is bizarre & a strategy departure. Dying to know the logic,” Andrea Wasserman, a former Nordstrom and Hudson’s Bay executive, wrote on Twitter following the news. The derision kept coming as people questioned and even mocked the move. “$COH changing its name to ‘Tapestry’ is a horrible branding idea. Fire the executive who proposed the change,” J Christian Bernabe, a nonprofit digital content director, tweeted.

Chief Executive Victor Luis, however, downplayed the social media backlash. “At the end of the day some of the social media reaction is misplaced because people think we are changing the name of the Coach brand, which we are not doing,” Luis told Reuters. “It’s really about creating a new corporate identity for Coach as a house of brands.” Luis added that the management had been thinking about changing the company’s corporate name for a while, but made the decision to change it after the acquisition of Kate Spade. Founded in a loft in Manhattan in 1941, Coach has grown into a multi-billion dollar company, building its business on the success of its Coach handbags that for many years were widely coveted by wealthy women shoppers around the world.