Tarrant Apparel Group

Tarrant Apparel Group was a Los Angeles private-label clothing maker that designed and sourced women's jeans and casualwear for America's biggest retailers. Founders Gerard Guez and Todd Kay took the company private in mid-2009, ending its life as a listed stock, and the business was renamed Sunrise Brands. Sunrise continues in private-label apparel, and the TAGS label — a travel wardrobe line created by Jackie Rose, drawing on decades of fashion experience alongside Gerard Guez — is part of the same group's story.

Company Profile

The October 2013 summary describes the model precisely: a private-label maker whose speciality was women's jeans, alongside shorts, skirts, shirts, dresses and jackets, sold to retailers including Kohl's, Chico's, New York & Company, Wal-Mart, Lane Bryant and Charlotte Russe. Its American Rag Cie brand sold at Macy's, and Alain Weiz-labelled items sold through specialty and department stores, with production by third parties, primarily in China. Private label means the retailer's name, not Tarrant's, appeared on the garment — scale without consumer branding.

The historical reference in the record dates the founding to 1985 and lists the relationship network the company was built on: specialty retail, mass merchants and national department stores including Dillard's, JCPenney, Kmart, Kohl's, Lerner New York, Sears and Mervyn's. Several of those customers have themselves since closed, which is part of why the private-label business consolidated. As Sunrise Brands, the group kept the same essential trade: designing and sourcing clothing that retailers sell under their own labels.

The range behind the name is private-label jeans, dresses and casualwear. Its customers are department stores, mass merchants and specialty retailers selling under their own labels. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Tarrant Apparel Group 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 Tarrant Apparel Group 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 — Taken private in 2009 and renamed Sunrise Brands — the business continues as Sunrise Brands — 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.

Company summaries of this kind were the working tool of the apparel trade as much as of investors: a buyer, landlord or supplier checking Tarrant Apparel Group could see its scale, its headquarters and its own description of its business in a few paragraphs. Those dated descriptions are kept with their dates, because a store count from 2013 or a strategy statement from 2019 is evidence about that year, not about today. The current position is the one given in the snapshot: taken private in 2009 and renamed sunrise brands.