Gerber Scientific

Gerber Scientific, Inc. was the Connecticut technology company whose automated manufacturing systems — equipment and software for cutting, plotting, product development and production — served the apparel, sign-making, specialty graphics and ophthalmic lens industries. Its Gerber Technology business, founded in 1968, became the apparel industry's best-known supplier of CAD software and automated cutting systems. Gerber Scientific traded on the New York Stock Exchange as GRB until Vector Capital took it private in 2011; a decade later, on June 1, 2021, the French technology group Lectra acquired Gerber Technology, combining the two great rivals of fashion technology.

Company Profile

The October 2013 summary in the record calls Gerber Scientific a giant in automated manufacturing systems, its equipment and software used by graphics, apparel, industrial and flexible-materials companies, with a signage subsidiary, Gerber Scientific Products, alongside the apparel-facing technology business. The September 2007 summary lists the same three end markets: sign making and specialty graphics, apparel and flexible materials, and ophthalmic lens processing.

The February 2019 summary is written from inside the private era, under the Gerber Technology name: for nearly half a century the company had been helping customers develop, manufacture and take products to market, providing integrated software and hardware solutions to more than 78,000 customers. That installed base — pattern systems and cutters embedded in factories worldwide — is what Lectra bought in 2021.

The range behind the name is CAD software, plotters and automated cutting and spreading systems. Its customers are apparel, graphics, industrial and flexible-materials manufacturers in more than 130 countries. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Gerber Scientific 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 Gerber Scientific 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 — Taken private in 2011 — Gerber Scientific was acquired by Vector Capital; its operating business, Gerber Technology, was acquired by Lectra on June 1, 2021 — 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, Gerber Scientific is a useful case: the apparel industry's best-known technology supplier, ultimately combined with its great French rival. 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.