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The North Face is an outdoor product manufacturing company. It specializes in Jackets , Fleecewear , Luggage , and Shoes , designed to withstand the forces of nature, and the clothing and equipment lines are catered towards Climbers , Mountaineers , Skiers , Snowboarders , and Hikers . The clothing line is famous for its use on mountaineering expeditions on Mt. Everest and in other extreme outdoor activities. As The North Face has increased in popularity recently, it has become somewhat infamous for its trade in counterfeiting circles and its increase in theft, which may have resulted from the clothing line's high prices. HISTORY AND THE NORTH FACE LOGO The North Face brand was established in 1966 , in San Francisco . At that time, Douglas Tompkins created an equipment retail store that eventually acquired the current name "The North Face". This name was chosen because the north face of a mountain in the northern hemisphere is generally the steepest, coldest, and most difficult face to climb. By the 1980s , skiwear was added to the line of products, and eventually Camping equipment was added as well. The North Face is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the VF Corporation . Tompkins sold the business in 1968, and he and his wife began the ESPRIT clothing brand. The North Face's easily recognizable Logo consists of a slightly skewed quarter-circle with two lines running within it. This image is supposedly an interpretation of the famous Half Dome rock formation in Yosemite National Park . Adjacent to the symbol are the words THE NORTH FACE embroidered in large block letters. RISE IN POPULARITY, COUNTERFEITING, AND THEFT In the late 1990s and early 2000s, The North Face became a well known brand and its popularity, especially among youth and college students, increased substantially. Even to this day, one can walk around college campuses even in the warmest environments and see college students donning various styles of North Face jackets. This increase in popularity may be attributed to the fact that hip hop stars were often seen wearing North Face jackets in music videos. An upper-end North Face winter jacket currently costs about $500 USD . Due to the increase in demand for these products and the high prices of these products, a market developed for the Counterfeit , or illegal replication, of genuine North Face goods. Non-genuine North Face items, which are often sold on the online auction site EBay , can usually be detected due to misplacement of logos and the obvious inferiority of craftsmanship. In addition to this, many non-genuine The North Face products are clearly not made of Gore-Tex, despite being marked so. For the same reasons that North Face products are counterfeited, these items are also often stolen. In early 2005 , a group of teenagers from Washington D.C. were arrested on charges including the armed theft of specifically The North Face jackets from randomly picked students walking down the street {Link without Title} . The alleged thieves would then resell the products for a substantially decreased price. EXTERNAL LINKS
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