Perry Ellis International

Perry Ellis International, Inc. is the Miami apparel company that began in 1967 as Supreme International, the guayabera and uniform importer founded by Cuban immigrant George Feldenkreis, went public in 1993, and in 1999 bought the Perry Ellis designer business and took its name. From Miami the company designs, sources, markets and licenses a portfolio of brands — Perry Ellis, Original Penguin by Munsingwear, Laundry by Shelli Segal, Rafaella, Cubavera, Savane and Farah among them — and holds licences including Nike Swim and golf lines under Callaway, PGA Tour and Jack Nicklaus. Perry Ellis traded on Nasdaq as PERY until October 2018, when George Feldenkreis took the company private at $27.50 a share; his son Oscar Feldenkreis continues to lead it.

Company Profile

The portfolio model is the company's defining structure: each brand is styled, priced and distributed for its own channel — Perry Ellis and Manhattan in dress clothing, Cubavera in Latin-inspired sportswear, Savane in casual pants, Original Penguin in retro-styled sportswear — while production is contracted to a worldwide network of independent suppliers. The listed company was therefore a design, sourcing and licensing business far more than a manufacturer.

Licensing runs in both directions in the record: Perry Ellis licenses its own brands out to other makers for categories it does not produce, and licenses famous names in — Nike for swim, Callaway and the PGA Tour for golf — which is why the summaries read as a roster of labels rather than a single product line. That two-way licence book is the asset the Feldenkreis family bought back in 2018.

The range behind the name is menswear, golf apparel, swimwear and fragrances under owned brands including Perry Ellis, Original Penguin, Cubavera and Savane, plus licensed lines. Its customers are department stores, specialty retailers and consumers through the brands' own stores and e-commerce. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Perry Ellis International 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 Perry Ellis International 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 — Taken private — an entity controlled by founder George Feldenkreis acquired Perry Ellis in a $437 million transaction completed on October 22, 2018, at $27.50 per share; the company continues as a private brand owner and licensor — 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 Perry Ellis International sat at a point where fashion meets the public markets: investors following the shares were really following spending on branded menswear, golf and swim apparel and licensed designer labels. 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 October 2013 summary describes the company at its listed scale: an apparel company managing a portfolio of brands, designing, sourcing, marketing and licensing its products across dress, casual, golf, swim and active categories, sold through department stores, mass merchants and its own retail and e-commerce channels. That single full-portfolio summary is the whole of its dated record here, and it is folded into this page.