Some companies rip off products. Target imitates entire brands

When Americans went into lockdown last year and began shedding their tailored clothes for sweatpants and leggings, Target was ready. In January 2020, it had debuted its newest in-house brand, an activewear label for women, men, and kids called All in Motion. The pieces, most affordably priced at under $30 an item, were on-trend and made from the latest technical fabrics. During the pandemic, sales of All in Motion exploded. The brand generated $1 billion in revenue for Target in its first year—an extraordinary achievement considering that high-profile activewear startups like Outdoor Voices and Tracksmith have yet to see a fraction of that success.

All in Motion’s aesthetic, however, wasn’t all that new. The product assortment and silhouettes were likely familiar to devoted Target shoppers, who may have purchased items from Champion’s C9 line, an affordably priced activewear brand that had been sold exclusively through Target for more than 15 years until it was dropped by the retailer at the end of 2019. Both lines offered a version of boys’ track pants, for example, with colorful panels along the seams; both offered girls’ leggings in bold graphic patterns. And their prices were nearly identical. (Target says that its designs for All in Motion are original, and that any similarities reflect basic market trends.)

Champion had designed and produced its C9 athletic wear for Target under a long-standing licensing deal that, in 2018, raked in $380 million for Champion’s parent company, Hanesbrands. When Hanesbrands announced, in August 2018, that Target wouldn’t be renewing its C9 contract when it expired at the end of 2019, analysts used the next earnings call to grill then-CEO Gerald W. Evans Jr. about what the company would do now with C9 and how it could ensure a “competitive moat” around the brand, should Target decide to create a similar line. Hanesbrands, which declined to comment for this story, had little leverage and a lot at stake: In 2018, Target accounted for 11% of its $6.4 billion in sales across its many brands, which include Hanes, WonderBra, and Maidenform.

Target, for its part, seemed to see the C9 contract’s expiration as a chance to do what it increasingly does best: develop and launch a stylish brand internally—and keep all the revenue for itself. Since Target CEO Brian Cornell announced a plan to double down on the company’s portfolio of private-­label brands in 2017, the retailer has been recapturing the design halo that it developed back in the aughts through savvy collaborations with the likes of Michael Graves and Isaac Mizrahi. The in-house brand strategy, which has Target’s own designers incubating new product lines from the company’s design lab in its Minneapolis headquarters, has been an unmitigated success. Though the company declines to share how many people are on its design team, their facilities include a 3D lab for prototyping, a lab for chemists and materials scientists to test new products in, a painting studio where prints and patterns are created, and a sensory-testing facility to accommodate Target’s emphasis on inclusive design.