PLCE

The Children’s Place, Inc.

A children's-clothing maker that designs and sells its own brands — The Children's Place, Gymboree, and Sugar & Jade — plus school uniforms, for kids from newborns to pre-teens across North America. Two Harvard Business School graduates, David Pulver and Clinton Clark, founded it in 1969 in Hartford, Connecticut, as shops mixing children's apparel, toys, and accessories. An ironic twist: when Gymboree went bankrupt in 2019, it named The Children's Place as a rival — and then The Children's Place bought the Gymboree brand.