Duofold Men's Fashion Brand

Ever since the inception of the Duofold brand over 100 years ago, the brand has remained dedicated to providing the warmth, comfort, and performance you need to Live Unconditionally, in strictly product terms. Beecher Crouse's quest for the perfect balance of the comfort of cotton and the warmth of wool sparked the creation of the Duofold brand and the revolution known now as the base layer category in 1906. The brand is now part of the Champion brand division at HanesBrands. Duofold and Champion have teamed up for a new base layer product offering, Duofold by Champion; both brands are owned by HanesBrands. The offering itself is plain: high performance baselayer tops and bottoms to help fight back the cold.

The product logic is the founding logic, and a careful reader should see how directly one follows from the other. A base layer is the garment worn against the skin under everything else, so its two jobs are comfort where it touches and warmth where it insulates. Crouse's 1906 answer was a balance - the comfort of cotton and the warmth of wool in one construction - and the category name the revolution produced, the base layer category, is now the ordinary term for the whole class of garment. Duofold's men's page is therefore a specification page: tops and bottoms, judged on warmth, comfort and performance, with no styling claims anywhere in the record.

From Dawson International to HanesBrands

The ownership history comes in two dated steps. As reported on Bloomberg News on August 4, 1999, the Sara Lee Corporation, maker of clothing brands that include Hanes and Playtex, agreed to pay 95.7 million dollars in cash to buy two businesses from Dawson International P.L.C. to increase its European sales; the companies had signed a letter of intent the month before and had received American regulatory approval. Dawson, based in Scotland, was selling its Duofold and J E Morgan brands to focus on making cashmere products. With the purchase, Sara Lee, based in Chicago, expanded its business in brand-name clothing - which generated more than a third of its annual revenue - and extended its foothold in Europe.

The second step is shorter. In 2006, the US-based Hanesbrands Inc, which was spun off by the Sara Lee Corporation, owned brands such as Hanes, Champion, Playtex, Wonderbra and Duofold, among many others. That list explains the present arrangement the first section records: Duofold sits in the Champion brand division at HanesBrands, and the joint offering is sold as Duofold by Champion. The directory frame points onward in three directions, all in this page's lists: the Champion brand profile here in the Men's Fashion Brands directory, the HanesBrands record and the Sara Lee Corporation profile. The official Duofold by Champion range, at Champion, is in References.

Reading This Duofold Record

Read as a buying guide, the record reduces to the product facts and nothing else, which suits a base layer. The range is high performance baselayer tops and bottoms to help fight back the cold; the standard is the founding balance - the comfort of cotton with the warmth of wool - carried forward as warmth, comfort and performance; and the label to look for is Duofold by Champion, the teamed offering of the two HanesBrands brands. No weights, sizes or prices are stated; the 1906 creation, the 1999 purchase price and seller, and the 2006 spin-off list are the dated facts that make this a directory record rather than an advertisement.

Duofold, under D in the Men's Fashion Brands directory: the base layer brand sparked in 1906 by Beecher Crouse's quest for the perfect balance of the comfort of cotton and the warmth of wool, dedicated for over 100 years to warmth, comfort and performance, bought by the Sara Lee Corporation from Dawson International in 1999 for 95.7 million dollars, carried into Hanesbrands Inc at its 2006 spin-off, and now offered as Duofold by Champion in high performance baselayer tops and bottoms.

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