Colophon

About this archive

coachbook is an independent reference archive of vintage Coach Leatherware, 1941–2002. Built from free public sources with citation discipline. Not affiliated with Coach, Inc.

Scope

Vintage Coach starts in 1941, when Gail Leather Products opens in a Manhattan loft. It runs through the Bonnie Cashin years (1962–1974), the Cahn-family ownership (1961–1985), the Sara Lee era (1985–2001), and the Reed Krakoff transition (1996 onward). It ends, for our purposes, around 2002 — the season the original heritage silhouettes (Willis, Court, Companion Flap, Daypack) drop out of the catalog and Legacy West replaces them.

The Krakoff transition is treated as contrast only: in scope where it bounds the NYC era, not as the archive's main subject. See PLAN.md for the full scope rules.

Editorial standards

Every claim in this archive carries two things:

A confidence tag

confirmed · likely · tentative · disputed

A source citation

A short, stable source ID (e.g. coach-catalogs-1960-1989) that resolves in the registry to a tiered, dated, archive-snapshotted reference.

Tier 1 is primary documents — Coach catalogs, SEC filings, USPTO records. Tier 2 is reputable secondary sources — encyclopedia entries, trade press, museum archives. Tier 3 is community references — collector blogs, PurseForum threads. Tier 4 is listing evidence — eBay, Etsy, individual auction lots. Tier 1 overrides Tier 2; Tier 2 overrides Tier 3 unless triangulated. Full rules: STYLE.md.

Why 2002?

The 2002 Autumn catalog is the last in-scope catalog. By that point Willis 9927, Court 9870, Companion Flap 9076, and the original Daypack 9791 have all been retired and the Krakoff-era Legacy West sub-collection has replaced them with re-numbered, re-named silhouettes. After 2002 the archive's subject — vintage NYC-era Coach — no longer exists as a current-season concept.

Corrections

Trust comes from documenting being wrong. Every correction is dated and logged in errata, with a before/after and the source that surfaced the error. Nothing is silently overwritten.

To flag a correction: open a GitHub issue with the page, the claim, and the source you'd cite against it.

Method

The catalog corpus (107 Coach catalogs, 1960–2020) was deep-read season-by-season across research streams M, N, O, P, Q (one stream per period). Each stream produced a primary-source-cited research file in research/; corrections to model and authentication entries flow from there. The full research index shows every stream and what it covers.

Code, data, and the full editorial method are public at github.com/pjdoland/coachbook.

The work

Built and edited by PJ Doland. Not a commercial project; not for sale. If the archive helps you authenticate, date, or research a specific bag, that's the entire point.