Big Dog Holdings

Big Dog Holdings, Inc. was the Santa Barbara, California company behind Big Dog Sportswear — the graphic activewear brand built around an oversized Saint Bernard logo and the slogan 'If you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch.' Founded in 1983 and public from 1997, when it traded on Nasdaq as BDOG, the company sold humorous, sports- and lifestyle-themed graphic apparel for men, women and children through outlet and mall stores, catalogues and online, and from 2004 also owned the Walking Company comfort-footwear chain. The Big Dogs stores have since closed and the brand is sold exclusively online at bigdogs.com.

Company Profile

The October 2013 summary in the record describes the mature, online-only brand: high-quality, reasonably priced activewear and accessories for all ages, created at the Santa Barbara headquarters, its graphic tees and lifestyle apparel reflecting the activities and sports popular in California and across the country — sports, humour, attitude, hobby and occupation themes, and designs poking fun at famous people, current events and pop culture.

The corporate story behind the summary is a distressed-brand specialism: the management team that took over in 1992 built the company by buying recognisable brands cheaply — Big Dog itself out of an earlier bankruptcy, the Walking Company out of bankruptcy in 2004 — and running them for cash. The footwear chain eventually became the larger business, and the holding company took its centre of gravity with it, leaving Big Dogs as a pure online brand.

The range behind the name is graphic activewear and accessories under the Big Dogs brands. Its customers are men, women and children of all ages, now exclusively online. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Big Dog Holdings 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 Big Dog Holdings 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 — No longer traded under its own listing — the Big Dogs brand is now sold exclusively online; the former listed company also owned the Walking Company footwear chain — 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 Big Dog Holdings sat at a point where fashion meets the public markets: investors following the shares were really following spending on humorous graphic activewear. 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.