OshKosh B'Gosh?

01The quick version

The name did not arrive whole. It was built in two separate additions, years apart, long after the company existed. 'Oshkosh' entered the corporate name in 1896, naming the Wisconsin city where the company sat, after founder Frank Grove was bought out. 'B'Gosh' arrived fifteen years later, in 1911, when general manager William Pollock heard the phrase used as a tagline in a New York vaudeville routine. Even then the combination was not official. The company did not formally adopt the name OshKosh B'gosh until 1937. So there was no single christening in 1895. There was a founding under an unrelated name, a place-name added in 1896, a borrowed stage line picked up in 1911, and a paperwork decision in 1937 that finally made it permanent.

02Who this is for

Today the brand sells children's clothing, described in its own catalogue as durable, comfortable apparel meant for everyday wear, built on classic and timeless styles going back to 1895. The company makes clothing for babies and children, from preemie and newborn sizes up to size 14, and no longer produces adult sizes. That makes it a children's-only label now, not a general apparel maker that happens to also sell kids' clothes. Anyone shopping the brand today is buying into that narrowed range, whatever the company made or sold in its earlier decades.

03How it got the name

It started in 1895 as the Grove Manufacturing Company, founded by Frank E. Grove, J. Howard Jenkins, and James Clark, based at what later became 112 Otter Ave. in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Nothing in that original name pointed to the city or to any exclamation. In December 1896, Grove was bought out of the business, and it was renamed Oshkosh Clothing and Manufacturing Co. That is the point where the place-name entered the name for the first time, over a year after the company began operating.

The second half of the name took much longer to arrive. In 1911, general manager William Pollock heard the phrase 'Oshkosh B'Gosh' used as a punchline in a vaudeville routine in New York, and the company began using it as well. This detail comes from Wikipedia's account of a Wisconsin Historical Society record, at one remove from the record itself. It is worth naming that limit plainly rather than passing the vaudeville story off as fully verified in its own right.

What is more solidly documented is the gap that followed. The tagline was picked up in 1911. The name was not made official until 1937. Twenty-six years passed between a general manager overhearing a phrase on a New York stage and that phrase becoming the company's registered identity. The founders who started the business in 1895 played no recorded part in choosing either half of the name that eventually replaced their own.

04Saying it out loud

Two very different jobs sit inside this name. One half names a real place, the city of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and carries the flat, geographic solidity that any town name carries. The other half is a spoken exclamation, borrowed from a stage routine, built to be said out loud with a laugh behind it. Fused together, they do not blend into one texture. They sit next to each other, one grounded and one performing, which is the structure the catalogue describes as a place-name anchor followed by a period exclamation hook. That mismatch is what people remember. A flat place-name alone would read like a shipping label. The exclamation alone would read like a joke with no address. Together they read like a place that also, for some reason, shouts.

05Why people remember it

Nobody sitting down to invent a children's clothing brand from scratch would land on this combination on purpose. A sober Midwestern place-name fused to a vaudeville punchline is not the kind of pairing a naming committee produces. It happened because a general manager, not a founder, heard a phrase on a stage in another city and it stuck to a company that had already been trading under two other names for sixteen years. That accidental, secondhand quality is part of what makes the name hard to forget. It reads as found rather than manufactured, and the exclamation built into 'B'Gosh' gives it a spoken energy that a purely descriptive or invented brand name would not carry on its own.

06What makes it work

The name has outlasted almost everything else about the company that carried it. In 2005, Carter's bought OshKosh B'gosh for 312 million dollars, and the brand kept operating under its original name rather than being folded into Carter's own. Before that, the Wisconsin plant closed in 1997, and by 2000 domestic manufacturing had fallen below ten percent of production as work shifted to subsidiaries in Mexico and Honduras. The company also stopped making adult sizes altogether, narrowing itself to babies and children up to size 14. Ownership changed. Where the clothes were sewn changed. Who the clothes were sized for changed. The name assembled between 1896 and 1937 did not. It survived becoming a subsidiary of a company it once had nothing to do with, and it survived the disappearance of its own factory floor.

07The other questions

Who owns OshKosh B'gosh, and does OshKosh own Carter's, both point in the wrong direction. Carter's bought OshKosh B'gosh in 2005 for 312 million dollars, and OshKosh B'gosh still operates under its own name as part of Carter's, not the reverse. Is OshKosh B'gosh still in business follows the same fact. Yes, it operates today under Carter's ownership.

When did OshKosh stop making adult clothes has no exact date on record. What can be said is that the company currently produces clothing only for babies and children, from preemie and newborn sizes up to size 14, with no adult sizing, and no closing date for adult production has been published. When did OshKosh stop making in the USA is better documented on the manufacturing side. The Wisconsin plant closed in 1997, and domestic production had fallen below ten percent by 2000, with work moved to subsidiaries in Mexico and Honduras.

08Source ledger