Nitches, Inc.

Nitches, Inc. is the San Diego wholesale apparel company founded in 1973 as Beeba's Creations and renamed Nitches in 1995, which imports and distributes clothing manufactured to its specifications overseas — women's sleepwear and loungewear, women's sportswear and outerwear, and men's casual and performance apparel — under its own brand labels, including Adobe Rose, Body Drama and Southwest Canyon, and as private label for department stores and national chains. Nitches listed on Nasdaq in 1985 and traded as NICH; in January 2009 it announced its intention to voluntarily delist from the Nasdaq Capital Market, and the shares have since traded over the counter while the wholesale business continued.

Company Profile

The model described in the record is full-service importing: fabric selection, financing, garment manufacture to specification and domestic distribution handled for retail customers, so that a department store or chain can carry a differentiated line without running its own overseas sourcing. 'Niche' is in the name and the method — defined market segments, served at low cost, rather than a single national brand.

The 2009 delisting notice preserved in the record is a small-company document worth reading plainly: a letter from Nasdaq about a late quarterly filing, and the company's own notice of voluntary delisting filed alongside its results. For every large listing in this section there were dozens of small ones for which the cost of being public outweighed the benefit, and Nitches is the specimen that says so in its own words.

The range behind the name is women’s sleepwear and loungewear, women’s sportswear and outerwear, and men’s casual and performance apparel, own-label and private label. Its customers are department stores, specialty boutiques and national and regional chains. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Nitches, Inc. 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 Nitches, Inc. 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 — Operating as a small wholesale apparel company — Nitches voluntarily delisted its shares from the Nasdaq Capital Market in 2009, and its stock (NICH) has since traded on the over-the-counter markets — 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 Nitches, Inc. 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: operating as a small wholesale apparel company.

History in Brief

The historical reference in the record describes the continuing business: a wholesale importer and distributor of clothing and home-decor products manufactured to its specifications and distributed in the United States under its own brand labels and retailer-owned private labels, in three clothing categories — women's sleepwear and loungewear, women's sportswear and outerwear, and men's casual wear and performance apparel — marketed nationally through showrooms and representatives. The January 2009 Nasdaq notice and voluntary-delisting announcement that stand at the head of the same record mark the end of its listed chapter, not of the company.