Destination Maternity

Destination Maternity Corporation was the world's largest designer and retailer of maternity apparel, operating the Motherhood Maternity, A Pea in the Pod and Destination Maternity nameplates in stores and leased departments across the United States and Canada. Formerly Mothers Work, Inc., the company traded on Nasdaq under the symbol DEST. It filed for Chapter 11 on October 21, 2019; its remaining stores were liquidated and Marquee Brands acquired its name, websites and other operating assets for about $50 million, continuing the brands online.

Company Profile

The October 2013 summary gives the listed-era scale: 1,893 retail locations including 606 stores and 1,287 leased departments, an exclusive Oh Baby by Motherhood collection in more than 1,100 Kohl's stores, and franchise relationships in India, the Middle East and South Korea. The leased-department model was the company's distinctive asset — maternity sections inside department and baby stores that no competitor matched nationally.

The 2019 summaries show the contraction: 1,108 locations by November 2018, then 937 by August 2019, split between 446 stores and 491 leased departments. The October 2019 Chapter 11 announcement in the record, filed in Delaware, began the wind-down that ended the store chain while preserving the brands as an online business.

The range behind the name is maternity apparel and accessories under Motherhood Maternity, A Pea in the Pod and Destination Maternity. Its customers are expectant mothers, in stores, leased departments and online. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Destination Maternity 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 Destination Maternity 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 — Stores closed — filed for Chapter 11 in October 2019; its brands and online business were acquired by Marquee Brands for about $50 million — 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, Destination Maternity is a useful case: the world's largest maternity retailer, undone by falling birth rates and store costs. 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.