Designs

The founders were members of the Portland Rowing Club, and in 1913, the company was asked to provide a rowing suit for use in the chilly mornings on the Willamette River.^[1] The story, as told by Zehntbauer in the company paper, the Jantzen Yarns:

I waited on him and took his order for these rowing trunks, to be made of a stitch like that of a cuff of a sweater so that they would stay up without a drawstring. After he tried them, he liked them so well that he came back for another pair and other members of the club heard about them, saw them and came in and ordered trunks like them. Nearly every member of the club who rowed had a pair. Later on, this same member came to me and asked if we could not make him a bathing suit of the same material ... a suit was made for him and he went to the ocean to bathe in the cold water. When he came back, he came into the store and told us that it was heavy and one could not swim well in it, but that he was well satisfied because it was so much warmer than any suit that he had ever had before and that it made ocean bathing a pleasure. ... this experience gave us the idea that a bathing suit made of this stitch, only in lighter weight, would be an excellent garment. We discussed this between ourselves and decided that we would order a needle bed for our sweater machine that would be fine enough to knit a rib-stitch bathing suit in a weight that would be comfortable. Roy, Carl, Joe Gerber and I were constantly in the water those days, either in the Y.M.C.A. swimming pool or in the river and we began to experiment for our own use on swimming suits made of this fine elastic fabric. We soon developed a suit which we found was the most excellent garment for swimming that we had ever seen.

The one-piece garment of pure wool that Carl Jantzen designed eventually became the prototype for the rib-stitch swimsuits that were first produced in 1915.

Brand name

After weeks of discussion and searching for a name which we could use as a trade-mark, we were unable to agree upon any of the many names which were submitted to us. We were using the brand P.K. at the time, the initials of the Portland Knitting Company ... Both the names Zehntbauer and Jantzen were suggested to us by our friends, but neither of us was willing to use our own name because it did not sound right to us ... Combinations were also suggested; one I remember was "Jan-Zen" or to be used without the hyphen, "Janzen. " Another was "Portknit". Up to the very last minute no one could decide to use either of the names suggested, so one day shortly previous to the time Mr. Gerber brought over his proposed advertising program, I was in his office to order stationery which needed to be printed at once, as we had waited as long as possible to make a decision on the trademark before printing new stationery. After a short conference I gave him the order to go ahead and print the stationery using the Jantzen trademark on all of it. The name of the company of course was not affected, being Portland Knitting Company making Jantzen trade-marked merchandise.

Following World War I, a national advertising campaign was launched with advertisements illustrating Jantzen suits placed in Vogue and the old Life Magazine. Jantzen was a leader in promotion of its new product. The cover of the advertisements featured the "Red Diving Girl", which became adopted as the logo of the company and recognizable worldwide.

MaRy Dunhill was the last child and only daughter of Alfred Dunhill [1872-1959], the founder of Alfred Dunhill a company that moved from selling motoring accessories to tobacco products before becoming the luxury brand it is today.

Mary joined the family business in 1924 as an assistant cashier and then moved through other areas of the firm before leaving in 1926 to establish Mary Dunhill Salons Ltd. and open a salon at 39 Craven Road, Lancaster Gate, London.

Exactly why she started out on her own is not clear. Balfour writes that it was her uncle, Herbert Dunhill [1884-1950], who first suggested the idea but Mary states that the impetus came from her father (Dunhill, 1979, pp. 77-78). Both may be right. Herbert Dunhill may have made the initial suggestion but Alfred Dunhill appears to have bankrolled the business. He owned most of the shares in the new company and gave them to Mary in 1927 when the business was seen to prosper (Balfour, 1992, pp. 86-87). Mary writes that her father had bankrolled the business was so that she could sell hair oil and face creams from an Edgware business he had recently bought an interest in (Dunhill, 1979, p. 77).

In February, 1931, Mary Dunhill expanded into the second and third floors of Craven Road before moving down the road to 34a in 1936. However, after a promising start, the business fell into difficulties and ceased trading in 1940. The tipping factor for the closure was probably the outbreak of the Second World War in September, 1939.

The close of Mary Dunhill did not mean the end of Mary’s business career. In 1943, she became a director of Alfred Dunhill Ltd. and then went on to become the chairman of the company in 1961 and company president in 1975. It was also not the end of Mary Dunhill cosmetics as an American branch of Mary Dunhill had been established in 1934.