Esprit's Homecoming
For the first time in more than a decade, there is an Esprit store in Southern California. In early March, the company opened an emporium on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica after having no stores in California since the 1990s. Esprit was founded in San Francisco in the late 1960s by Susie and Doug Tompkins, who created a profitable brand popular with young people. Doug and Susie went their separate ways in 1990. Today the brand is headquartered in Hong Kong. While Esprit has hundreds of stores in Asia and Europe, it has only 13 stores in the United States, located mostly on the East Coast. This is the company’s first West Coast store to open in recent years.
