Everlast

Everlast is the boxing and fitness brand founded in the Bronx in 1910 by Jacob Golomb, a tailor's son who began by making swimsuits guaranteed to last a full season and turned to boxing equipment after Jack Dempsey came to him for training gear. Dempsey won the heavyweight title wearing Everlast gloves in 1919, and the name outfitted champions from Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano to Muhammad Ali. As Everlast Worldwide, Inc. the company traded on Nasdaq as EVST, designing and licensing boxing and fitness goods, until Sports Direct International acquired it in September 2007 for $33.00 a share, about $182 million in total. The brand continues today inside the Frasers Group.

Company Profile

The listed company's business had two halves: sporting-goods equipment sold under its own name, and a licensing programme that put the Everlast name on apparel, footwear, eyewear, watches, nutritional products and other active-lifestyle goods through dozens of licensees in more than 100 countries. Licensing, not manufacturing, was where the heritage converted into margin — a pattern the brand has followed under every owner since.

The move into mixed martial arts in the 2000s extended the same logic to a new fight sport: the name that meant boxing gloves to one generation was re-presented to a younger audience in a different cage, while the core boxing line — gloves, trunks, bags and training equipment — continued through department stores, sporting-goods stores, catalogues and online.

The range behind the name is boxing gloves, trunks, punching bags and fitness equipment, and licensed apparel, footwear, watches and accessories. Its customers are fighters, gyms and sporting-goods customers, and licensees in more than 100 countries. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Everlast 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 Everlast 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 — Everlast Worldwide was acquired by Sports Direct International in September 2007 for about $182 million; the Everlast brand is now held within the Frasers Group, Sports Direct's successor — 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 Everlast sat at a point where fashion meets the public markets: investors following the shares were really following spending on boxing and fitness equipment and licensed sporting goods. 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.

History in Brief

The company's own account of itself in its final listed years describes a brand with one foot in the ring and one foot in the closet: trunks and gloves that had outfitted pugilists from Jack Dempsey to Muhammad Ali, a name extended into mixed martial arts, and licences for children's wear, footwear, watches, exercise equipment, gym bags and other products, sold through department and sporting-goods stores, catalogue retailers and online. That account already named the owner that ended the listing — Sports Direct International, through its Brands Holdings unit.