Russell Corporation

Russell Corporation was the Alexander City, Alabama athletic-apparel company founded in 1902 by Benjamin Russell, whose company is credited with creating the modern sweatshirt around 1930 — a cotton practice jersey developed for his son's football team — and grew into Russell Athletic, for decades the largest maker of team uniforms in the United States, plus the Spalding and Brooks businesses it acquired in its final listed years. Russell traded on the New York Stock Exchange as RML until 2006, when Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway acquired it for $600 million as a fit with its Fruit of the Loom subsidiary. The business continues as Russell Brands, LLC, headquartered in Bowling Green, Kentucky, with the Russell Athletic brand repositioned toward consumer and heritage apparel after leaving the team-uniform business in 2017.

Company Profile

The sweatshirt origin is the company's permanent contribution to the industry's vocabulary: what began as a comfort substitution for a wool jersey became the blank canvas of American casual and team apparel, and Russell's Jerzees line carried that garment into the imprinted-sportswear trade this guide's wholesale readers know best.

The Berkshire purchase logic is stated in the record's own terms: a cash-generative, brand-owning apparel maker whose value did not depend on fashion forecasting — team uniforms, fleece and tees — bought by the same owner that had taken Fruit of the Loom out of bankruptcy four years earlier, and run since as a quiet unit of that group.

The range behind the name is team uniforms, fleece, T-shirts and athletic apparel under Russell Athletic and Jerzees, in its listed years. Its customers are schools, teams, sporting-goods retailers and the imprinted-sportswear trade (in its operating years). That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Russell Corporation 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 Russell Corporation 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 — Berkshire Hathaway acquired Russell Corporation in 2006 for $600 million and folded it into Fruit of the Loom; the business continues as Russell Brands, LLC — 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 Russell Corporation 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: acquired.

History in Brief

The May 2012 summary gives the company in its Berkshire form: Russell Brands, LLC, a Fruit of the Loom company headquartered in Bowling Green, Kentucky, whose Russell Athletic line had supplied America's athletes and teams for more than 100 years, a leading supplier of team uniforms at high school, college and professional level, alongside activewear and college-licensed product. That single dated summary is the whole of its record here and is folded into this page.