The Arrow Collar Man
Encyclopedia
Cluett Peabody & Company
Cluett Peabody & Company, Inc. once headquartered in Troy, New York was a longtime manufacturer of shirts, detachable shirt cuffs and collars, and related apparel. It is best known for its Arrow brand collars and shirts and the related Arrow Collar Man advertisements...
of Troy, New York
Troy, New York
Troy is a city in the US State of New York and the seat of Rensselaer County. Troy is located on the western edge of Rensselaer County and on the eastern bank of the Hudson River. Troy has close ties to the nearby cities of Albany and Schenectady, forming a region popularly called the Capital...
. The original campaign ran from 1905-31 though the company continued to refer to men in its ads and its consumers as "Arrow men" much later.
The Arrow Collar ads were a collaborative production of New York ad agency Calkins and Holden
Earnest Elmo Calkins
Earnest Elmo Calkins was an American advertising executive who co-founded the Calkins and Holden advertising agency. He pioneered the use of art in advertising, of fictional characters, the soft sell, and the idea of "consumer engineering"...
; Cluett, Peabody advertising director Charles Connolly; and commercial illustrator J. C. Leyendecker
J. C. Leyendecker
Joseph Christian Leyendecker was one of the pre-eminent American illustrators of the early 20th century. He is best known for his poster, book and advertising illustrations, the trade character known as The Arrow Collar Man, and his numerous covers for The Saturday Evening Post. Between 1896 and...
. Leyendecker's model was his live-in companion, a Canadian named Charles Beach. Hundreds of printed advertisements were produced from 1907 to 1931 featuring the Arrow Collar Man. The fictional Arrow collar man became an icon and by 1920 received fan mail. He inspired a Broadway musical Helen of Troy in 1923.
Attached collars
In the early 1920s Cluett, Peabody & Co. began manufacturing their shirts with attached collars in response to consumer demand and became the most successful company in the U.S. at that time. Their sales increased to 4 million collars a week and Arrow shirts with attached collars were being exported to foreign ports such as Batavia (JakartaJakarta
Jakarta is the capital and largest city of Indonesia. Officially known as the Special Capital Territory of Jakarta, it is located on the northwest coast of Java, has an area of , and a population of 9,580,000. Jakarta is the country's economic, cultural and political centre...
) and the Belgian Congo
Belgian Congo
The Belgian Congo was the formal title of present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo between King Leopold II's formal relinquishment of his personal control over the state to Belgium on 15 November 1908, and Congolese independence on 30 June 1960.-Congo Free State, 1884–1908:Until the latter...
. The Arrow Collar Man campaign ended in 1930 having been one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history.