Fifth & Pacific Companies

Fifth & Pacific Companies was the short-lived middle name of one of American fashion's best-known corporations. Founded in 1976 as Liz Claiborne Inc., the company sold its Liz Claiborne brand rights to J.C. Penney in 2011, renamed itself Fifth & Pacific in May 2012 — trading as FNP — around its remaining brands, Juicy Couture, Lucky Brand and Kate Spade, then sold Juicy Couture and Lucky Brand in 2013 and renamed itself Kate Spade & Company in February 2014. Coach, Inc. acquired Kate Spade & Company for $2.4 billion in July 2017, and the corporate line ends inside Tapestry, Inc., as Coach renamed itself that October.

Company Profile

Read as a stock, Fifth & Pacific was a simplification story told in three transactions: a diversified brand house built over thirty-five years was reduced, brand by brand, to the single label — Kate Spade — that public markets valued most. Each sale funded the focus, and the final renaming admitted what the portfolio had already become.

The jewellery division is the part of the record easiest to overlook: alongside the famous apparel brands, the company ran a private-brand jewellery design and development business supplying department stores, with exclusive supplier agreements covering the Liz Claiborne and Monet lines at J.C. Penney and Dana Buchman jewellery at Kohl's. It was wholesale craft of exactly the kind this section documents, carried on after the name brands were gone.

The range behind the name is women’s and men’s apparel, accessories and fragrance under Kate Spade New York and Jack Spade, in its final form. Its customers are premium-brand customers in the company’s stores, department stores and online (in its operating years). That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Fifth & Pacific Companies 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 Fifth & Pacific Companies 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 — the company renamed itself Kate Spade & Company in February 2014 and was acquired by Coach, Inc. (now Tapestry, Inc.) in a deal completed in July 2017 for $2.4 billion — 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 Fifth & Pacific Companies 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.