Ralph Lauren founded his company in New York in 1967 at 28, after convincing his employer, tie manufacturer Beau Brummell, to let him launch a line of his own. He named his first full menswear collection Polo in 1968, working initially out of a single drawer in a showroom in the Empire State Building. Bloomingdale's gave him his own in-store shop in 1969 (the first time the department store had done that for any designer), and by 1972 he'd opened his first freestanding store, on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills; the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 1997.