Syms

Syms was the off-price clothing chain founded in 1959 by Sy Syms, built on the slogan that 'an educated consumer is our best customer' and on selling authentic designer and brand-name clothing and shoes for men, women and children at genuine bargains. Syms Corp. also owned Filene's Basement, the Boston-born off-price pioneer it had bought in 2009. The two chains filed for bankruptcy together in November 2011, and all 46 Syms stores and the Filene's Basement fleet closed by the end of December 2011; the surviving corporation renamed itself Trinity Place Holdings and became a real-estate company.

Company Profile

The October 2013 summary in the record is the corporate epitaph: Trinity Place Holdings, formerly Syms Corp., had formerly owned and operated 46 off-price stores under the Syms name and the Filene's Basement business, had no operations as of August 2012, and was selling property — its Elmsford, New York site went in August 2013. The April 2006 summary is the trading voice it replaced: over 40 years of real bargains on real designer clothes, more than 200 authentic designer and brand names, from a Secaucus base.

Syms and Filene's Basement were the two founding names of American off-price retail — Basement's automatic markdown system dated to 1909, and Syms took branded apparel discounting to the suburbs from 1959. That they ended in the same filing, just as off-price was beginning its long boom under TJX and Ross, is one of the sector's sharper ironies: the pioneers carried the real estate and the debt, and the followers took the market.

The range behind the name is authentic designer and brand-name clothing and shoes at off prices. Its customers are educated bargain hunters — men, women and children — in Syms and Filene's Basement stores. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Syms 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 Syms 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.

Because Syms no longer operates independently, there is no current company website to link from the snapshot, and enquiries that would once have gone to its head office belong with the successor named in the status line — or, where the business closed entirely, the record here is the end of the trail. The dated summaries remain useful to researchers precisely because the company can no longer update its own account of itself.

The stock record matters because Syms sat at a point where fashion meets the public markets: investors following the shares were really following designer clothing at off prices for educated consumers. 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.