Hm.com Biography & Web Analysis

Hennes & Mauritz AB (H&M) is a worldwide apparel manufacturer based in Stockholm, Sweden. It's famous for its fast-fashion apparel for men, women, youth, and kids. H&M employs 126,000 full-time equivalent employees in 74 countries as of November 2019, with over 5,000 locations under several company names.

It is the world's second-largest clothes store, after Spain's Inditex (parent company of Zara).  The company, which was founded by Erling Persson and is now headed by his son Stefan Persson and Helena Helmersson, offers online shopping in 33 countries.

Erling Persson began the company in 1947, when he launched his first store in Västers, Sweden.  Hennes (Swedish for "hers") was a boutique that only offered women's apparel. In Norway, a store debuted in 1964. In 1968, Persson purchased the Stockholm-based hunting gear retailer Mauritz Widforss, which resulted in the addition of a menswear line to the product line and the name change to Hennes & Mauritz.

In 1974, the firm went public on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. The first store outside of Scandinavia, in London, opened shortly after, in 1976. H&M continued to expand in Europe, and in 1998, it purchased the name hm.com from a business called A1 in a non-public domain sale, and began selling online. [required citation] According to Whois information, the two-letter domain was first registered in 1997. The commencement of the development outside of Europe was marked by the opening of its first U.S. store on Fifth Avenue in New York City on March 31, 2000.

In a news release in 2008, the company stated that it would start selling home goods. H&M Home is currently available in stores all over the world, having first been supplied through the company's online catalog. [where?] In 2009 and 2010, after expanding into Asia and the Middle East and opening concept stores like as COS, Weekday, Monki, and Cheap Monday, branding consultancy Interbrand placed the company as the twenty-first most valuable worldwide brand, making it the highest-ranking retailer in the poll. It was expected to be worth $12–16 billion.

At the end of 2011, H&M had 2,325 stores, and at the end of August 2012, it had 2,629 stores. In September 2013, the company established its 3,000th store in Chengdu, China. As a result of the COVID-19 epidemic, H&M announced in October 2020 that they expect to liquidate 5% of its global stores in 2021.