Oxford Industries

Oxford Industries, Inc. is the Atlanta apparel company founded in 1942, which transformed itself from a maker of military uniforms and private-label clothing into a house of lifestyle brands — Tommy Bahama and Lilly Pulitzer above all, with Southern Tide, The Beaufort Bonnet Company and Duck Head in the current portfolio, and Ben Sherman and Lanier tailored clothing in its earlier form. Oxford has traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol OXM since 1964, an unusually long listing for this section, and operates its brands' stores, Tommy Bahama's restaurants and bars, and a substantial wholesale business supplying department and specialty stores with resort, women's and men's lifestyle apparel.

Company Profile

The January 2011 transaction in the summary — the sale of Oxford's private-label Oxford Apparel operations to LF USA — is the pivot of the modern company: the original wholesale manufacturing business, the reason Oxford appears in a wholesalers' guide at all, was sold so the branded lifestyle portfolio could stand alone. What remained was brands, stores and restaurants; what left was the contract-sewing heritage the company was founded on.

The brand-group structure in the older summary — Tommy Bahama, Lilly Pulitzer, Ben Sherman and Lanier Clothes as four operating groups, with 96 Tommy Bahama, 16 Lilly Pulitzer and 16 Ben Sherman locations including outlets, and 13 Tommy Bahama restaurants beside the stores — also records a retail experiment few apparel wholesalers attempted: selling the resort meal alongside the resort shirt, in the same premises.

The range behind the name is lifestyle apparel under Tommy Bahama, Lilly Pulitzer and its other brands, plus branded stores and restaurants. Its customers are resort and lifestyle customers through wholesale accounts, the brands’ stores and online. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Oxford Industries 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 Oxford Industries 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 — 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 Oxford Industries 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.