1809 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103
U.S.A.
Telephone: (215) 564-2313
Fax: (215) 568-1549
Web site: http://www.urbanoutfitters.com
Public Company
Incorporated: 1976
Employees: 6,200
Sales: $827.8 million (2005)
Stock Exchanges: NASDAQ
Ticker Symbol: URBN
NAIC: 448140 Family Clothing Stores
Urban Outfitters, Inc., operates specialty retail stores under the Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Free People banners. The company operates two business segments: the lifestyle merchandising retail segment, which oversees store operations, and a wholesale apparel business. Both Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie offer customers hip and trendy apparel and home furnishings through retail locations, catalogs, and Web sites. The first Free People store opened in 2002. The freepeople.com Web site soon followed. As of January 2005, Urban Outfitters Inc. operated 65 Anthropologie stores, two Free People retail locations, and 75 Urban Outfitter stores in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Beginnings

Urban Outfitters was created in 1970 by two retail novices, anthropology graduate Richard Hayne and his former roommate at Lehigh University, Scott Belair. Hayne was just back from two years working with Eskimos in Alaska as a VISTA Volunteer; Belair was a second-year student at Wharton School of Business and needed a project for his entrepreneur workshop. Over beer one night, the two came up with the idea of a store for college and graduate students, selling inexpensive clothes and items for dorm rooms and apartments. Pooling $5,000, they opened the Free People Store in Philadelphia, near the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. In a 400-square-feet store decorated with packing crates and beat-up furniture, they offered inexpensive secondhand clothing, Indian fabrics, scented candles, T-shirts, drug paraphernalia, and ethnic jewelry. "I was that market," Hayne told Dan Shaw of The New York Times in 1994, adding that "Everyone