Crabtree & Evelyn

Crabtree & Evelyn is a brand of personal care products currently based in London, England. It began as an American retail chain in 1971 that grew to be a successful multi-national company.

The founders sold the chain in 1996, and the brand was subsequently resold multiple times.

The brick and mortar stores became increasingly unprofitable, with numerous closings in 2009. It was announced in November 2018 that all retail and wholesale operations were to cease to exist worldwide in 2019.

The brand relaunched on 16 July 2019 as an exclusively online store.[1][2] The US website stopped all sales in February 2022, and has remained dormant since.

Founding

Crabtree & Evelyn was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1955 by Janus Films co-founder Cyrus Harvey. The enterprise began as a small shop in Cambridge under the name The Soap Box.

In 1971, Harvey met English designer Peter Windett while in London and the two started a 25 year business partnership, changing the company's name to Crabtree & Evelyn. In 1977, the company opened a stall in Faneuil Hall in Boston, and its first stand alone shop was opened by Stephen Miller in the Montgomery Mall in Montgomeryville, Pennsylvania.[3] Harvey invented the products, while Windett designed the packaging and other branding. American tourists looked for the store in England, prompting the founders to open their first store on Kensington Church Street in 1980. Over time, many more locations were added in the US and UK, and new stores also opened in several European countries, Canada, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia.

The company's name, conceived by Harvey and Windett, paid homage to John Evelyn, a 17th-century English author, gardener, and diarist. The brand's original logo depicted a wild apple tree, from which the company gets the former element of its name (in the United States, wild apple trees are known as crab-apple trees).

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