Carter's

Carter's, Inc. is the largest branded marketer of baby and young children's apparel in the United States, selling through its Carter's and OshKosh B'gosh brands in its own stores, online and through major retailers. Founded in 1865, it is a public company on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CRI, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Its multi-pack bodysuits, sleepwear and playwear are staple purchases for new parents, which gives the business an unusually steady replacement cycle as each new cohort of babies arrives.

Company Profile

The two brands divide the market by age and attitude: Carter's covers newborns, babies and toddlers with soft basics and gift sets, while OshKosh B'gosh — acquired in 2005 and famous for denim overalls since the nineteenth century — serves toddlers and young children with playwear. Together they dress the same child for most of the first seven years of life.

Carter's sells through three channels at once — its own stores, its websites and wholesale accounts with large retailers — so its results reflect both direct consumer demand and the ordering patterns of the department and mass stores that stock its brands. The summaries in this section date from its years of expansion as a listed company.

The range behind the name is baby and young children's clothing under two brands. Its customers are parents and gift buyers, through Carter's stores, its websites and major retailers. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Carter's 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 Carter's 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 — 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.

The stock record matters because Carter's sat at a point where fashion meets the public markets: investors following the shares were really following spending by new parents on baby clothing. The dated company summaries gathered in this section were written for that audience, recording store counts, sales descriptions and company statements as they stood at the time. Read together with the current status above, they show both halves of the story — the business as it presented itself in its listed years, and what became of it afterwards.