PVH Corp.

PVH Corp. is the New York apparel company — known for most of its life as Phillips-Van Heusen — that owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, two of the world's best-known fashion brands, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol PVH. The company's roots run to 1881, when Moses Phillips and his wife Endel began sewing shirts by hand and selling them to coal miners in Pottsville, Pennsylvania; the Van Heusen name, the Arrow brand and the 1950s purchase of G.H. Bass built the shirt company that, after acquiring Calvin Klein in 2003 and Tommy Hilfiger in 2010, renamed itself PVH Corp. in 2011 and became a brand house whose wholesale business supplies department stores and retailers on every continent.

Company Profile

The two flagship brands divide the work: Calvin Klein is run largely as a licensing and brand business with global partners, while Tommy Hilfiger is operated more directly, with a large European business run from Amsterdam. Under both sits the wholesale machinery this section documents — seasonal lines sold into department stores, specialty chains and digital accounts, alongside PVH's own stores and websites.

The heritage shirt brands that built the company — Van Heusen, Arrow, IZOD — were sold in 2021 to Authentic Brands Group, completing the transformation the summaries catch in progress: from an American shirt manufacturer with licences, to the owner of two global designer brands whose value sits in their names as much as in any single season's product.

The range behind the name is apparel, accessories and licensed products under Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. Its customers are department stores, wholesale accounts and consumers in the brands' stores and online, worldwide. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place PVH Corp. 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 PVH Corp. 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 PVH Corp. 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.