Guess Women

Who cannot notice the easily recognizable question mark symbol of popular American designer brand? Guess USA is famous for its sensually fraught advertisement campaigns that are all depicted in non-colored photos featuring top models in the fashion world and Hollywood celebrities like Drew Barrymore, Claudia Schiffer, Anna Nicole Smith and of course the controversial hotel heiress Paris Hilton. But was is really the story behind the success of Guess Women's clothing becomes the biggest question mark for many fashion aficionados who are part of the loyal clientele of the designer brand.

While Guess women's collection is primarily marketed as an all American brand, the brand is a creative alliance of four brothers who were originally born in Algerian but raised up in France. Georges, Paul, Armand, and Maurice Marciano were of Sephardic descent, and Marciano is actually a common Jewish surname. The four brothers transferred to California in 1977 and decided to put up the clothing company in 1981, featuring their very first product – the Guess Women's jeans with three zippers that they dubbed as “Marilyn”. The style was initially met with reluctance by many big stores and some fashion critics who were all not inclined to the stoned washed denims they offered. However, Bloomingdale's finally relented and agreed to stock only twenty four pairs of Guess jeans as a sort of favor for the brothers. Surprisingly, all products were quickly sold out that prompted all other big stores and critics to realize that there is indeed quite a market for such jeans.

This started their iconic advertising campaigns that are all featured in black and white that won them a string of Clio Awards. A lot of fashion models benefited from the brand's campaigns and also achieved prominence by merely associating their beautiful faces with the Guess clothing line that have become a rage among young Americans.

While the product line primarily consisted of denim wear items for women, the company finally extended to include jeans for men. Truth be known, Guess was the very first line of denim wear who introduced the concept of designer jeans and soon became one of the most popular brands in the global market. Like other top fashion houses, Guess also ventured into offering luxury products such as accessories and even clothes for babies.

However, the blazing success was not sustained for long since the company suffered a dramatic downturn in the 90's along with other top designer brands such as Diesel Timmy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein. The company's stocks steeply dropped as Gap began to rise in popularity and threatened to topple most of the other competitors in the designer clothing industry. Other labor problems cropped up as Guess faced charges to claims that employees were not paid minimum wages and adequate payments for overtime hours worked. Instead of dealing with a serious labor court case, the company was forced to spend $ 573,000 for back wages to the underpaid employees. Even with the settlement of the labor disputes, the company again faced consequences of having their image tarnished, especially in the American market.

However, despite such problems, the company was still suitably profitable, especially when the company began expanding to cater more to the European and the Asian markets, which luckily turned out to be a highly lucrative venture. In the 200's, the company have totally revamped and taken on a new look and style, with marketing campaigns becoming increasingly sexier. The sales started to pick up again and started to attract the younger generation who prefer the edgier styles.

Today, Guess is still under the helm of the Marciano brothers, operating in various countries with the majority of their outlets located in Canada and the United States. The Guess jeans are still among the widely favored products of the company that offers unrivaled styles that caters to the younger generation.

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