New York & Company (RTW Retailwinds)

New York & Company was a specialty retailer of women's fashion apparel and accessories aimed at fashion-conscious, value-sensitive women, with roots in the Lerner Shops chain founded in 1918 and a long history inside Limited Brands before its spin-off. The listed company traded on the New York Stock Exchange as NWY and renamed itself RTW Retailwinds, Inc. in 2018. RTW Retailwinds filed for Chapter 11 on July 13, 2020 and closed its roughly 380 stores; the New York & Company brand and e-commerce business were sold and continue online.

Company Profile

The February 2019 summary in the record describes the renamed company: RTW Retailwinds, a specialty women's omni-channel retailer with a multi-brand lifestyle platform, first incorporated in 1918, operating roughly 430 retail and outlet locations in 36 states alongside growing digital sales. The 2013 summary records the single-brand era: New York & Company merchandise sold through its national store network and at nyandcompany.com, for women aged 25 to 49.

The brand itself is older than either summary's company: Lerner Shops — later Lerner New York — was for much of the twentieth century one of America's largest women's specialty chains, and the New York & Company name it adopted in the 1990s carried that value-fashion position into the mall era. The 2020 filing ended the store chain, not the name.

The range behind the name is women's fashion apparel and accessories at value prices. Its customers are fashion-conscious, value-sensitive women, formerly in stores and now online. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place New York & Company (RTW Retailwinds) 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 New York & Company (RTW Retailwinds) 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 — RTW Retailwinds filed for Chapter 11 in July 2020 and closed its store fleet; the New York & Company brand continues online under new ownership — 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 New York & Company (RTW Retailwinds) sat at a point where fashion meets the public markets: investors following the shares were really following value women's fashion spending. 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.