Haggar Clothing Co.

Haggar Clothing Co. is the Dallas menswear company founded in 1926 by Joseph Marion Haggar Sr., a Lebanese immigrant who started with four employees and two sewing machines and built the largest slacks business in the world — the company credited with inventing the word 'slacks' itself. Haggar was a listed company from 1992 until 2005, when private-equity buyers led by Perseus LLC and Pou Chen took it private in a $212 million deal; in 2019 it was acquired by Randa Accessories, the New York neckwear and accessories house (now Randa Apparel & Accessories), where the brand continues, sold through department stores and its own channels across North America.

Company Profile

The product record is a history of practical firsts aimed at the working man the founder started out serving: pre-cuffed trousers, wash-and-wear and wrinkle-free cotton pants (the 1992 line that relaunched the brand), and expandable tab-waist trousers. The summaries' store arithmetic — product in about 10,000 stores across the U.S., Canada, Mexico and the UK and more than 70 outlet stores — describes a wholesale-first business with retail as a supporting channel.

Haggar's hall-of-fame jackets are the brand's most visible wholesale sideline: the company supplies the induction jackets for the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the Hockey Hall of Fame, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the United States Bowling Congress Hall of Fame — a reminder that for a century-old workwear name, ceremonial garments are still garments with a specification and a buyer.

The range behind the name is men’s pants, slacks, sport coats, suits, shirts and shorts. Its customers are men shopping at department stores, mass retailers and the brand’s own channels in North America. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Haggar Clothing Co. in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing Haggar Clothing Co. with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

For current dealings, the snapshot at the top of this page is the place to start: it gives the company's present status — Acquired — Haggar was taken private in 2005 by a group led by Perseus and Pou Chen, and was acquired by Randa Accessories (now Randa Apparel & Accessories) in 2019; the brand continues within Randa — and links to the official website, which is where current product ranges, store information and investor or corporate contacts are maintained. Anything in the dated summaries that conflicts with the snapshot should be read as the older position: summaries describe the year they are dated, and the snapshot describes the company as it stands now.

For anyone researching the fashion industry's public-company era, Haggar Clothing Co. is a useful case: the Dallas pants maker that named the slack and outlasted its own listing by two decades. The summaries in this section were compiled while the story was still unfolding, which is exactly what makes them worth keeping — they preserve what the company said about itself at the time, before the outcome was known.