Oxford Industries History

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The Company Description of Its Time

Oxford Industries, Inc. is a producer and marketer of branded and private label apparel for men, women and children, providing retailers and consumers with a wide variety of apparel products and services. Its owned brands at filing include Tommy Bahama, Indigo Palms, Island Soft, Ben Sherman, Arnold Brant, Ely and Walker and Oxford Golf, and the company also holds exclusive licenses to produce and sell certain product categories under the Tommy Hilfiger, Nautica, Geoffrey Beene, Slates, Dockers, and Oscar de la Renta labels. Oxford's customers are found in every major channel of distribution, including national chains, specialty catalogs, mass merchants, department stores, specialty stores and Internet retailers. Branded goods and private label work under one roof is the company's defining structure: the same organisation that builds consumer brands also manufactures quietly for retailers' own labels.

Three Groups: Tommy Bahama, Menswear and Womenswear

The Tommy Bahama Group is a lifestyle company that defines elegant tropical living with men's and women's sportswear, denim, swimwear, accessories and a complete home furnishings collection, and it produces two additional collections under the Indigo Palms and Island Soft brands. Tommy Bahama products can be found at the country's finest retailers, the filing says, as well as in more than forty-five company-owned retail stores across the country. The Oxford Menswear Group is a leading producer of branded and private label dress shirts, sport shirts, dress slacks, casual slacks, suits, sportcoats, suit separates, walkshorts, golf apparel, jeans, swimwear, footwear and headwear, with owned brands including Ben Sherman, Oxford Golf, Ely, Cumberland Outfitters and Cattleman, a tailored clothing division trading as Lanier Clothes, and exclusive licenses adding Cubavera, Havanera and Evisu to the list kept above.

Inside that menswear group sits Ben Sherman, a London-based designer, distributor and marketer of branded sportswear, accessories and footwear, acquired by Oxford in 2004. Ben Sherman has a long heritage, the filing says, as a modern, young men's shirt brand that has evolved into an irreverent global lifestyle brand for youthful-thinking men and women, with distribution beyond its U.K. roots to the United States, Canada, Continental Europe, Australia and the Far East. The Oxford Womenswear Group completes the structure as a major producer of budget and moderately priced private label women's apparel for mass merchant and catalog retailers: sportswear separates, coordinated sportswear, outerwear, dresses and swimwear. Three groups, three price worlds - tropical lifestyle branding, licensed menswear, and private label womenswear - sharing one parent.

The Stock, the Foundation and the Filing's Own Pointers

Oxford's stock has traded on the NYSE since 1964 under the symbol OXM, a listing date that makes the company one of the longer-tenured public apparel firms in this directory, and this page preserves routes to Apparel Search's own Oxford stock information page and Oxford news directory for readers following the financial record. Oxford Industries also supports numerous charitable organizations through its administration of the Oxford Foundation. The Oxford Industries Foundation, Inc. exists, in its stated mission, to enhance the quality of life in the business community through support of human services, cultural, educational and health-related organizations, directing contributions toward advancing the public welfare and supporting employee participation in the giving process. The Foundation, the filing notes, does not view its philanthropy as charity but rather as an investment in a better society.

The historical record closes with two pointers this rebuild preserves verbatim in spirit and in links. Oxford Industries is definitely different than oxford shoes, the filing warns: readers looking for shoes are directed to the shoe guide, not to this apparel producer. And readers interested in working at the company are directed to search fashion careers at Oxford, a route carried in the kept links below beside the stock and news routes. The profile itself is dated by its source: posted by Apparel Search on September 27, 2007 and updated in January 2011, which is why the brand lists, store counts and license rosters should be quoted as the 2011 record they are, with the January 3, 2011 sale announcement at their head.

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