Wilsons Leather

Wilsons Leather is the American leather-goods retailer whose history dates to 1899 as Bermans Leather, a leather garment manufacturer and factory-outlet retailer, and which became the leading specialty retailer of leather outerwear, accessories and apparel in the United States. In July 2008 the listed company sold the Wilsons brand name, its online store and 116 outlet stores to G-III Apparel Group; the remaining company, renamed PreVu Inc., was delisted that August and liquidated its mall stores. G-III ran Wilsons Leather as a store chain until 2020, when it closed the 110 stores and kept the brand trading online.

Company Profile

The April 2006 summary in the record tells the founding story in brief: Bermans Leather and Wilsons House of Suede combined into the chain that made leather a specialty-store category — coats, jackets and accessories sold by a retailer that did nothing else. The October 2013 summary is written from the owner's side, describing G-III Apparel Group's range of outerwear, dresses, sportswear, luggage and leather goods, the business Wilsons had joined.

Two dates organise the modern story. The 2008 sale separated the brand, which had a future, from the listed mall chain, which did not; and the 2020 closure of the G-III-owned stores completed the same migration online that the 2008 deal had begun, leaving Wilsons as an e-commerce brand inside a wholesale-led group.

The range behind the name is leather outerwear, jackets, accessories and apparel. Its customers are customers seeking specialist leather goods, formerly in stores and now online. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Wilsons Leather 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 Wilsons Leather 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 as a brand — Wilsons Leather is owned by G-III Apparel Group, which closed its 110 Wilsons Leather stores in 2020; the brand continues online — 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 Wilsons Leather sat at a point where fashion meets the public markets: investors following the shares were really following spending on leather outerwear and accessories. 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.