August 6th, 2008 | 
Author: Coach is a classic American Company which started business in Manhattan, New York in 1941 by offering a few styles of deluxe leather handbags. The company started work with just six leather workers who made small leather goods, like wallets and billfolds, with their hands. In 1946, Miles Cahn, a lifelong New Yorker, came to work for the company. By 1950, he was running the factory for its owners.
By 1960, Cahn had noticed the distinctive properties of leather used to make baseball gloves. He wondered why women’s handbags and men’s valises couldn’t be made similarly so that they also become lustrous and supple over time, rather than becoming old and worn-out. He set to work tinkering with improving design and leather tanning methods and invented the Coach line of products that have grown in popularity with every passing year. 
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Coach took two steps to diversify its channels of distribution. Under a new vice-president for special products, the company began a mail-order business, and also began to open its own specialty stores, to sell Coach products outside a department store setting. Sales of Coach products grew steadily throughout this period, until demand began to outstrip supply. Department stores were selling all the Coach bags that the company could produce, and by the early 1980s it had become necessary to ration the products to various vendors.
In 1983 the Cahns purchased a 300-acre dairy farm in Vermont as a weekend diversion from their business in New York. Although the property was intended to provide a vacation home and retirement destination, the Cahns began to raise goats and market goat cheese under the brand name “Coach Farms” shortly after buying the farm. By 1985, they were commuting twice a week between Vermont and New York. In the summer of that year, after determining that none of their three children had any desire to take over the family business, the Cahns decided to sell the Coach. In July 1985, the Cahns cemented an agreement with the Sara Lee Corporation, which also sold foodstuffs and hosiery. In return for a sum reported to be around $30 million, the conglomerate took control of the company’s factory, its six boutiques, and its flagship store on Madison Avenue in New York. Sara Lee promised that it would continue to operate Coach in the way in which it had always been run. Taking over leadership of Coach as president was Lew Frankfort, who had joined the company in 1979 as vice-president of business development. Under its new owners and new president, the company prepared for a rapid expansion.
The Coach company is reputed for its high quality and well made leather bags. Coach is the designer, producer, and marketer of a prestigious line of handbags, briefcases, luggage, and accessories. Besides its main product line, the company offers Coach brand watches, footwear, and home and office furniture through agreements with licensing partners. The company made its reputation selling sturdy leather purses in unchanging, traditional, classic styles, and it remains one of the best-known leather brands in the United States and has a growing reputation worldwide.
The Coach continues to process its leather goods in a very special manner. The process starts with the selection of the leather pieces, the pieces with the best grain and color tones being selected. The Coach tans the leather themselves, using their own special formula of tanning ingredients designed to give maximum beauty to the leather without causing any damage. A “slow curing” method is used, which means that Coach takes its time tanning the leather over a period of many days…rather than using chemicals to speed up the process.