The Missing S: Burberrys to Burberry

There is a tie sitting with me right now that says Burberrys. Not Burberry. An s where you wouldn't expect one, sitting quietly at the end of a name most people think they already know how to spell.

The first time I noticed it, my instinct was that something was wrong. A misprint, maybe, or worse, a fake. That instinct turned out to be exactly backwards. The extra letter isn't a mistake at all. It's a date stamp, stitched in silk, telling you almost everything you need to know about how old this tie actually is.

A Name That Grew an S

Thomas Burberry opened his shop in Basingstoke, Hampshire, in 1856. He was twenty one. At the very start, the business was simply Burberry, his own surname, nothing added.

Somewhere in the following decades, as the company grew and its products spread across Britain and then overseas, people started calling it Burberrys. Not officially at first, just the way customers and shopkeepers referred to it in conversation, the way a family name sometimes gathers an extra letter through sheer repetition. Over time the company leaned into it. By the early to mid twentieth century, Burberrys was the name on the labels, the name on the luggage tags, the name printed across decades of advertising. It wasn't a nickname anymore. It was the brand.

That's the name that ended up on my tie. Look closely at the tag and it doesn't just say Burberrys either. Underneath, it reads New York, New England, then London, Made in England. That's not decoration, that's a distribution line. It means this exact tie passed through Burberry's American operation before it ever reached anyone's collar. A small, specific trail left behind by a company that, at the time, still wore its extra s with no hesitation.

One Letter, Removed On Purpose

For most of the twentieth century, Burberrys stayed the name. Then in 1999, everything changed at once. The company undertook a full rebrand, aimed at unifying its identity across every market it operated in. Out went Burberrys. In came Burberry, a single word, cleaner, easier to say the same way in London, New York, or Tokyo. A new logo came with it. The whole visual identity of the brand shifted in that one move.

It's a small edit on paper, the removal of a single letter, but it marked the end of an era that had lasted the better part of a century. Every tag printed before that point carried the s. Every tag printed after did not.

What The Tag Actually Tells You

Which brings the story back to the tie in my hand. A label reading Burberrys isn't a red flag. It's closer to the opposite. It means the piece predates 1999, made sometime in that long stretch when the extra letter was simply how the world knew the brand. Something that has survived decades, kept its stitching, kept its color, kept a tag that still reads clearly enough to tell its own story.

I almost dismissed this tie the moment I saw that s. I'm glad I didn't. It turned out to be the one detail on the entire tie that was actually telling the truth.