Superior Group of Companies

Superior Group of Companies, Inc. is the Florida company founded in 1920 as Superior Surgical Manufacturing, known for most of its life as Superior Uniform Group, which designs, manufactures and markets uniforms, career and image apparel and healthcare garments for employers across the United States, and trades on Nasdaq under the symbol SGC. From its St. Petersburg headquarters the company runs three segments: Branded Products (promotional products and branded merchandise through BAMKO and HPI), Healthcare Apparel (the Wink, Fashion Seal Healthcare and CID Resources lines of scrubs and medical apparel) and Contact Centers (The Office Gurus). The 2018 renaming acknowledged what the record shows: a uniform maker that had grown, by acquisition, into a group of branding and services businesses.

Company Profile

The uniform programme is the founding wholesale model: a catalogue of thousands of styles plus custom design, global manufacturing and distribution that puts a client's logo and identity on its workforce — hotels, food service, healthcare, security and transportation above all. The healthcare-apparel segment is the same competence aimed at hospitals and laundries rather than at employers directly.

The dated summaries catch the diversification mid-stream: BAMKO (2016) took the company into promotional products, HPI Direct added branded merchandise scale, and the El Salvador contact-centre business — originally serving its own customers — became a segment in its own right. Few companies in this section have travelled so far from their founding product while keeping the founding name's trade.

The range behind the name is uniform and image-apparel programmes, promotional products and branded merchandise, healthcare apparel including scrubs, and contact-centre services. Its customers are employers in healthcare, hospitality, food service, retail, security and transportation, and healthcare laundries and distributors. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Superior Group of Companies 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 Superior Group of Companies 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 — renamed Superior Group of Companies, Inc. from Superior Uniform Group, Inc. in May 2018 — 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 Superior Group of Companies 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.