Jones Apparel Group

Jones Apparel Group — in its later years The Jones Group Inc. — was the Bristol, Pennsylvania designer, marketer and wholesaler founded by Sidney Kimmel, whose Jones New York label taught American department stores the business of women's career clothing and whose portfolio grew to include Nine West, Anne Klein, Gloria Vanderbilt, Kasper and dozens of licensed and owned lines. The company traded on the New York Stock Exchange as JNY until Sycamore Partners took it private in April 2014 in a deal valued at about $2.2 billion including net debt, then split it into separate companies — Nine West Holdings, a jeanswear company, Jones New York and the Kasper Group among them. Jones New York itself was sold to Authentic Brands Group in 2015.

Company Profile

The December 2013 announcement preserved in the record states the endgame terms precisely: $15.00 per share in cash, about $1.2 billion for the equity and approximately $2.2 billion including net debt, structured as a one-step merger with The Jones Group as the surviving corporation. It is a complete specimen of the period's private-equity take-private of a mature wholesale group whose brands were worth more apart than its listing was worth whole.

The brand list in the summaries shows why a break-up was thinkable: footwear and jewellery (Nine West, Napier, Givenchy jewellery under licence), career and casual apparel (Jones New York, Kasper, Gloria Vanderbilt jeans), and licensed lines from Albert Nipon to Jessica Simpson footwear. Each category had its own natural owner, and under Sycamore most of them got one.

The range behind the name is women’s apparel, footwear, jewellery and accessories under owned and licensed brands. Its customers are department-store customers across the United States (in its group years). That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Jones Apparel Group 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 Jones Apparel Group 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 and split — The Jones Group was acquired by Sycamore Partners in a transaction completed in April 2014 valued at about $2.2 billion including net debt, and split into separate companies; Jones New York was sold to Authentic Brands Group in 2015 — 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 Jones Apparel Group sat at a point where fashion meets the public markets: investors following the shares were really following orders for women’s career apparel, footwear and jewellery from department stores. 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.