Inventing the Outlet Mall: Reading and the Birth of Factory Retail
Near Reading, Pennsylvania
Somewhere in the nineteen sixties, a retail executive had an idea that seems obvious in retrospect but was genuinely novel at the time: if you sell surplus clothing directly from the factory to the public, you cut out the middleman and move inventory that would otherwise be written off. The man was M.O. Lee, then president of VF Corporation, and the place where the idea became real was Reading, Pennsylvania.
VF Corporation was the parent company of Vanity Fair, a hosiery and intimate apparel maker that had built its manufacturing operations in and around Reading. In nineteen seventy, Lee suggested opening a small store attached to the Vanity Fair mill in Reading, selling surplus and overrun garments directly to the public. The store opened in a five-thousand-square-foot space with a drop cloth separating shoppers from the factory floor.
It worked. The concept was so successful that VF expanded it, eventually converting Vanity Fair's old manufacturing mills in Wyomissing, the prosperous borough just west of Reading, into a dedicated retail complex they called the VF Outlet Village, which styled itself the Outlet Capital of the World. That claim was not entirely self-promotion: the Reading area was, for a generation, the acknowledged birthplace and capital of outlet shopping as a retail format.
The factory outlet model VF pioneered in Reading went on to reshape American retail. Outlet malls spread across the country through the nineteen eighties and nineties. The Premium Outlets and Tanger Outlets that appear outside virtually every mid-sized American city trace their lineage, directly or indirectly, to that drop-cloth-divided store in a Reading hosiery mill.
The original Wyomissing outlet complex eventually closed in twenty twenty, a casualty of online retail competition. The mills that housed it still stand.
