Weyco Group

Weyco Group, Inc. is the Milwaukee, Wisconsin footwear company founded in 1892 as the Weyenberg Shoe Manufacturing Company, which designs, markets and sources men's, women's and children's footwear under the Florsheim, Nunn Bush, Stacy Adams and BOGS brands and trades on Nasdaq under the symbol WEYS. Weyco is principally a wholesaler: its brands are sold through department stores, shoe chains, independent retailers and online accounts across North America, with Florsheim also run through retail and wholesale operations in Australia, South Africa and India. A fourth-generation family-influenced company, Weyco is one of the oldest continuously listed footwear businesses in this section — and one of the few in it that has remained independent throughout.

Company Profile

The brand ladder is the strategy in the summaries: Florsheim at the dress end, Stacy Adams in fashion-forward men's styles, Nunn Bush in comfort casual, and BOGS — acquired in 2011 — taking the company into insulated rubber boots and a younger, outdoor customer. Each brand wholesales to a different department of the same shoe store, which is the quiet efficiency of the portfolio.

Sourcing replaced making long ago in Weyco's model: the Milwaukee company designs and markets while production is contracted overseas, the reverse of its 1892 factory origins and the standard settlement for American footwear wholesalers of its generation — the listed company that remains is a brand and distribution business.

The range behind the name is men's, women's and children's footwear under Florsheim, Nunn Bush, Stacy Adams and BOGS. Its customers are department stores, shoe chains, independent retailers and online accounts in North America and partner markets. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Weyco Group 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 Weyco Group 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.

For anyone researching the fashion industry's public-company era, Weyco Group is a useful case: a Milwaukee shoe factory of 1892 that settled, durably, into brands and distribution. The summaries in this section were compiled while the story was still unfolding, which is exactly what makes them worth keeping — they preserve what the company said about itself at the time, before the outcome was known.