Cutter & Buck

Cutter & Buck Inc. is the Seattle designer and marketer of upscale sportswear founded in 1989, which climbed within a decade onto the leaderboard of America's golf-apparel makers and built parallel businesses in corporate and collegiate clothing. Cutter & Buck traded on Nasdaq as CBUK from its 1995 offering until April 2007, when Sweden's New Wave Group AB agreed to acquire it for $14.38 per share in cash, $156.5 million in total; the merger completed that June and Cutter & Buck became a wholly owned New Wave subsidiary, continuing its operations in Seattle, where it also serves as New Wave's North American distributor for the Clique basics brand.

Company Profile

The February 2019 summary in the record describes the New Wave-era company through its partnerships and licences — the NFL, NCAA, MLB, the PGA of America, the USGA, the PGA TOUR and the USTA — and its role as exclusive North American distributor of Clique, the European sportswear-basics brand. The October 2013 summary recalls the climb: relatively unknown less than a decade earlier, Cutter & Buck had reached the top ranks of the nation's golf-apparel makers, selling men's and women's golf apparel and sportswear through pro shops, resorts and specialty stores.

The acquisition logic ran in both directions, as both companies said at the time: New Wave gained an upscale American golf and corporate brand and a United States distribution platform, and Cutter & Buck gained a European owner able to carry its brands into the European corporate-promotional market — the cross-selling the February 2019 summary shows in operation.

The range behind the name is upscale golf and sportswear, corporate apparel and collegiate clothing. Its customers are golfers, corporations and universities, through pro shops, resorts, specialty stores and online. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Cutter & Buck 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 Cutter & Buck 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 — Acquired — Cutter & Buck was acquired by Sweden's New Wave Group AB in 2007 for $156.5 million and continues to operate from Seattle as a New Wave subsidiary — 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.

Company summaries of this kind were the working tool of the apparel trade as much as of investors: a buyer, landlord or supplier checking Cutter & Buck could see its scale, its headquarters and its own description of its business in a few paragraphs. Those dated descriptions are kept with their dates, because a store count from 2013 or a strategy statement from 2019 is evidence about that year, not about today. The current position is the one given in the snapshot: acquired.