Talon Zippers (Tag-It Pacific)

Talon International supplies zippers and trim to many of the world's best-known apparel brands, continuing the business that was listed for years as Tag-It Pacific Inc. The Talon name is one of the oldest in zippers — the brand supplied fasteners to the clothing industry long before Tag-It Pacific, incorporated in 1997, acquired and built its business around it. Today the company designs, engineers, tests and distributes Talon zippers, manages trim programs for brands and sells its Tekfit stretch waistband technology.

Company Profile

The October 2013 summary sets out the three-part structure that still describes the business: a Talon group designing and distributing zippers — including a specialty zipper for children's clothing — to apparel brands and manufacturers worldwide; a Trim group providing outsourced trim design, sourcing and management for fashion manufacturers; and Tekfit, a patented stretch waistband. Named zipper customers in that record include Abercrombie & Fitch, JCPenney, Wal-Mart, Kohl's and Juicy Couture, with trim services supplied to Victoria's Secret, American Eagle, Polo Ralph Lauren, Express and others.

That customer list explains why a component maker earned a stock page of its own: when a zipper fails, a garment fails, so brands treat fastener quality as a product-quality decision rather than a commodity purchase. Talon's business is specification work — engineering a zipper to a brand's garment, testing it, and delivering it through factories in the countries where the clothing is sewn.

The range behind the name is zippers, trim programs and stretch waistbands. Its customers are apparel brands, specialty retailers and mass merchandisers. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Talon Zippers (Tag-It Pacific) 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 Talon Zippers (Tag-It Pacific) 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 — Operating as Talon International — no longer publicly traded under Tag-It Pacific — 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, Talon Zippers (Tag-It Pacific) is a useful case: a fastener maker whose customers read like a directory of American apparel brands. 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.