Hampshire Group History
Earlier company descriptions, brand line-ups, store counts and photographs from the history of Hampshire Group, kept for historical reference.
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The Company Description of Its Time
This profile must start with its ending, because the historical record does. On November 25, 2016, Hampshire Group, Limited (OTC Markets: HAMP) announced that the company and two of its U.S. subsidiaries had filed voluntary petitions under Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware, in order to facilitate the orderly wind down of their business operations. Everything below that announcement is explicitly headed, in the historical record, as kept for historical purposes - and this rebuild preserves it in exactly that spirit, as the record of a substantial American sweater business rather than as a current trading offer.
Three Divisions and a Sweater Timeline, 1956 to 2008
The company worked through three distinct divisions. Hampshire Designers and Item-Eyes covered women's apparel, and Hampshire Brands covered men's. Hampshire Designers was one of the foremost designers and marketers of women's sweaters and cut and sewn knits, under Designers Originals, Spring+Mercer, Mercer Street Studio, Luxe360 and Hampshire Studio, each label with its own sensibility and tier of distribution. Item-Eyes sold related women's sportswear to moderate departments at Kohl's, JCPenney, Sears, Stage Stores and Goody's, under Requirements, RQT, Nouveaux, REQ and Tara Ryan - coordinating jackets, sweaters, skirts, pants and soft dressing pieces. Hampshire Brands marketed men's knitwear under the licensed Geoffrey Beene and Dockers brands and its own Spring+Mercer.
The filed timeline runs from a predecessor company selling acrylic sweaters under Designers Originals in 1956, through the formation of Hampshire Group, Limited by merger in 1977 and its initial public offering in 1992, to selling over 10 million sweaters in 1996 and approximately 19 million sweaters plus 5.5 million related separates units in 2002. Along the way it acquired Segue and Item-Eyes, licensed Geoffrey Beene in 1997 and Dockers in 1999, sold its manufacturing plants in 2000 to build a worldwide sourcing network, introduced Spring+Mercer in 2003 and RQT in 2004, signed the Joseph Abboud Components licence in 2007, and launched Luxe360 and the Sears-exclusive REQ in 2008. Read whole, it is a history of American wholesale knitwear moving from making to sourcing, licensing and brand management.
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