SELECTED BY
RALPH CAPLAN
EVERLAST LOGO
DESIGNED BY
JACOB GOLOMB
Nearly a century before the Michael Phelps swimsuit controversy, a seventeen-year-old Bronx swimmer named Jacob Golomb set out to improve swimsuit technology. He didn’t, but his new sporting goods company, Everlast, produced the gloves that Jack Dempsey wore in 1919 when he won the heavyweight championship of the world.
In 1925, Golomb designed elastic-waist trunks to replace the leather-belted ones then worn by boxers, an innovation quickly adapted by the men’s underwear industry. Dempsey wore the trunks with the elastic band prominently featuring the concave logo. The label has been almost synonymous with boxing gear ever since. The logo had a pseudo ubiquity. You didn’t actually see it everywhere; in fact you didn’t see it anywhere except on the trunks worn by both pro and amateur boxers. But to fans, that was everywhere. Everlast so dominated the field, that it was possible to be a boxing fan without even suspecting that there were any competing manufacturers.
Although I had no known interest in design or marketing, my childhood fantasy was to become lightweight champion of the world, so I was aware of Everlast and fascinated by the manufacturer’s audacity in displaying the company name on the outside of apparel. Everlast was thus the harbinger of branding strategies that were unthinkable until a culture evolved in which consumers wanted to advertise the companies that sold them things, because in that way they could advertise themselves. Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Abercrombie, Tommy Hilfiger, and the Gap were decades behind. The consumers that Everlast reached, however, were consumers of jabs, crosses, and uppercuts. The buying, or even watching, public was not accessible until television brought boxing into the living room on Friday nights.
Raymond Loewy’s design of the Lucky Strike cigarette package was praised for assuring that the product name was visible, even after the package had been crumpled and thrown into the gutter. Everlast did better than that. It was not uncommon for both fighters to be wearing Everlast, although it was not always seen by anyone not in a ringside seat. But the advent of television meant that the logo was on camera at all times; thus the brand could be displayed on the trunks and glove cuffs of both the poor stiff lying flat on his back on the canvas and the one, standing in a neutral corner, who had put him there. Talk about product placement!