Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
The Gap, Inc.
Gap sells everyday clothes, jeans, and accessories under several brand names through its own stores and websites.
Gap is a clothing company that most people know for one thing: the kind of basics you throw on without thinking — jeans, T-shirts, hoodies, and khakis. It sells these through its own stores and websites, and it runs several brands under one roof. The biggest are Gap itself, the value-focused Old Navy, and the athletic-wear brand Athleta. Banana Republic, which sells dressier work clothes, rounds out the group. So when you walk into a mall and see four different clothing stores, there is a real chance one company owns all of them.
The way the money works is simple. Gap designs the clothes, has factories make them, and then sells them to you at a markup through its stores and online. It also runs a big outlet business, where leftover or specially made goods get sold at lower prices. Old Navy is the workhorse — it sells huge volumes of cheap, cheerful family clothing and generates the bulk of the company's sales. Athleta was the growth story, riding the boom in women's athletic wear. The whole business lives and dies on getting the right clothes into stores at the right time, because fashion is fickle and unsold inventory has to be marked down, which crushes profit. Gap's history is basically the story of American mall retail. It started in 1969 in San Francisco selling jeans and records, then grew into a giant with thousands of stores. But the last decade has been rough. Shoppers moved online, fast-fashion rivals like Zara and H&M undercut it on price and speed, and Gap's own brands lost their cool. The company has spent years closing stores, cutting costs, and trying to win back customers. In 2025 it brought in a new chief executive, Richard Dickson, who previously ran Mattel, to try to revive the brands — a bet that a toy-industry marketing guy can make clothes feel exciting again.
The honest version of the story is that Gap is a mature retailer fighting for relevance. Its strengths are famous brand names, a huge store base, and Old Navy's scale. Its weaknesses are falling mall traffic, stiff competition, and a habit of losing touch with what shoppers want. It pays a dividend and has bought back shares over the years, but the real question is whether it can grow again rather than just shrink more slowly. For now, it is a company selling a lot of jeans and hoping its next chapter is better than its last one.
Saved answer · last researched 9 Nov 2026
BIG PICTURE
Old Navy brings in 56% of Gap Inc.'s sales, more than twice the Gap brand
- 56% Old Navy
- 44% Gap, Banana Republic, Athleta and other brands
Most shoppers picture the Gap logo when they hear the company's name. Old Navy actually pays the bills. Its 56% share of net sales is more than double the Gap brand's 23%, which means the plain, low-price family chain is the engine and the namesake label is the smaller piece. Source: MoneyDJ, data from 2025
Timeline
Don Fisher Opens the First Gap
Don Fisher just wanted jeans that fit. He couldn't find a 31-inch inseam anywhere, so in 1969 he and his wife Doris opened a store in San Francisco to sell them. He named it Gap for the "generation gap" and stocked Levi's alongside records and tapes to pull in young buyers. The real trick was simple: sizes were organized and always in stock, which is why the store grew fast while denim was booming.
The Gap Goes Public
Seven years after that first store, the company sold shares to the public, raising money to grow.
Gap Buys Banana Republic
Gap bought Banana Republic, a small chain with a safari-and-travel theme and a catalog business, adding an upscale brand next to its main stores.
Gap Stock Crashes
By 1987 the stock had climbed nearly 2,900% in five years. Then it fell by half in a matter of months after the company refused to share sales projections and then admitted August sales were weak and heavy discounting was coming. Sluggish sales, tough competition, and its own merch mistakes had caught up with it.
Old Navy Opens in Colma
Gap launched Old Navy to sell Gap-style clothes at lower prices, a new way to win shoppers while Gap's own sales were sliding.
Mickey Drexler Is Fired
Mickey Drexler had built Gap into a global name. But two years of falling same-store sales and a stock down about 75% got him fired in 2002. The ouster began a long string of CEO changes as Gap fell behind fast-fashion rivals H&M and Inditex, whose Zara chain could turn new styles around in weeks.
Gap Acquires Athleta
Gap bought Athleta, a women's activewear company that started as a catalog, and it later grew into one of the company's core brands.
Art Peck Is Ousted
In 2019 Gap fired CEO Art Peck amid its turnaround struggles and made chairman Robert Fisher interim CEO. Peck was just the latest: four CEOs since 2000 had all failed to deliver a lasting fix.
Gap Closes Hundreds of Stores
COVID-19 pushed Gap to close more than 225 Gap and Banana Republic stores, a number it later raised to around 350 by 2024, mostly in malls. The move sped up a shift away from mall retail toward online sales and off-mall locations.
Kanye West Ends Yeezy Partnership
Kanye West walked away from the Yeezy Gap deal, accusing Gap of not honoring its terms. Days later Gap cut about 500 corporate jobs as part of a wider cost-cutting push.
Gap Brand Returns to Growth
Under CEO Richard Dickson, the Gap brand started growing again, helped by strong denim and collaborations with names like Victoria Beckham and Harlem's Fashion Row. The company marked nine straight quarters of positive comparable sales, suggesting the turnaround finally took hold.
Gap Moves Into Beauty
Gap pushed beyond clothes into beauty and accessories, launching Gap Fragrances and GapBag while Old Navy Beauty Co. rolled out. Management pitched these higher-margin categories and a flashy "fashiontainment" marketing push as new long-term growth engines.