| Today’s Businessweek Daily is a special edition featuring stories from the July issue of the magazine, available online now. Senior reporter Amanda Mull is here with a preview of the cover story she co-wrote with Lily Meier. If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up for the newsletter here. You can also subscribe to get the print edition. Americans now buy more clothes every year than at any point in the country’s history, but it’s harder than ever to imagine that a clothing retailer could be robust and powerful enough to be thought of as a Great American Company. The garment industry long ago picked up and left US shores in search of cheaper labor and more permissive environmental standards, and the business of selling those clothes, too, has become steadily more international. Since the mid-2000s, retailers from Zara and H&M to Temu and Shein have used their huge selections and low prices to gobble up market share. Legacy American retailers, with their slower supply chains and higher prices, have spent the past two decades as sitting ducks. For much of that time, no company has symbolized this change better than the subject of our July cover story: Gap Inc. Once the king of the American mall and an integral player in ’90s pop culture, Gap’s long decline has frustrated millions of customers and tripped up a series of chief executives. The namesake brand’s revenue has declined by more than half from a mighty $7.3 billion in 2003, stymieing the overall company’s efforts to grow, even as annual revenue at its cheaper corporate counterpart, Old Navy, has surged well past $8 billion. But Gap has always had at least one thing working in its favor: nostalgia for its glory days, when everyone from suburban middle schoolers to supermodels felt cool in the company’s classic, affordable basics. Since the beginning of 2025, it’s looked like a Gap revival might actually be in the offing. CEO Richard Dickson, who arrived in 2023 fresh from the Barbie movie triumph at Mattel, is presiding over a brand that has leveraged collaborations with smaller, cooler clothing lines like Doen and Madhappy to turn the heads of both new and wayward customers. Gap’s regular clothes, too, have been selling well, leading the brand back toward consistent growth. The public was starting to take notice, and Gap’s buzz was starting to build—just in time for President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement to throw fragile optimism into chaos. Our story goes inside the company’s efforts to see if Gap, which has survived so many retail apocalypses before, can make it through one more. Keep reading: Inside Gap’s Last-Ditch, Tariff-Addled Turnaround Push |
