Don and Doris Fisher

Don Fisher was a forty-one-year-old real-estate developer who could not find a pair of Levi's in his size, and in August 1969 he and his wife Doris opened a store on Ocean Avenue in San Francisco that sold every size of Levi's and, to get people in the door, records. The name was a joke about the generation gap. The insight was retail rather than fashion — a single brand of jeans, organised by size, in a store that treated buying them as easy — and it was good enough to take the company public in 1976 and to about $500M of sales by the early 1980s, at which point Levi's began selling to everyone and Gap's advantage disappeared.

What the Fishers did then is the part of the record that deserves the credit. In 1983 they hired Mickey Drexler from Ann Taylor to run the Gap division, and when he told them to drop every other brand and put Gap's own name on everything, they let him. They also bought Banana Republic that year, backed Old Navy in 1994 when it was a genuine threat to the parent brand, and stayed out of the merchandising. Don remained chairman and a large shareholder; the family's holding, still around 40% of the company, is why Gap Inc. has never been broken up.

The contested passage is the ending. By 2000 the company had roughly doubled its square footage in three years and comparable sales had begun a 29-month decline; in September 2002 the board, with Don Fisher's agreement, fired Drexler and replaced him with Paul Pressler, an executive from Disney's theme parks. Drexler went to J.Crew and rebuilt it; Gap went through five chief executives in the next two decades and never regained its 2004 revenue. Don Fisher died in 2009. Doris Fisher, who chose much of the early merchandise and later gave the family's collection of modern art to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, remained on the board until the same year. Their sons Bob, Bill and John have all served as directors, and Bob has chaired the board through the current turnaround.