Apparel Companies S

Welcome to the S section of the Apparel Search Fashion Company Names directory. The chip grid below is this letter's table of contents: 23 company profiles, one chip each, in alphabetical order. S is the directory's great department-store letter and its most elegiac: it holds Saks, Sears in two filings, Selfridges and Spiegel - a century and a half of American and British retail between them - alongside Shopko and Stage Stores, the regional chains that served the towns the giants passed by. Several of those names no longer trade, and their profiles say so plainly at the top; the records they left are kept in full on their history pages.

The letter's other shelf is product and trade. There are footwear names known worldwide (Skechers, Sorel, Steve Madden), an icon of the American West (Stetson), the shapewear company a $5,000 idea built (Spanx), Paris accessible luxury (SMCP), Hong Kong's modern Chinese chic (Shanghai Tang) and the crystal house of Wattens (Swarovski). Behind them stands the trade itself: a Pasadena knitwear producer (Sovereign Sky), a Tirupur buying house (Spectraa Lingerie), the sewn-products suppliers' association (SPESA), a boardsports trade show (Surf Expo), a fashion job board (StyleCareers), two brand-portfolio companies (Sequential Brands, Sunrise Brands) and the ghost of the web's first great runway site (Style.com). Each profile below opens with a verified snapshot of the company as it stands now, and keeps the older record on a linked history page where the record is substantial, so a dated figure is never mistaken for a current one.

Reading the S Profiles: Department Stores, Survivors and the Trade Behind Them

Begin with the rise and fall of the American store. The two Sears filings face each other across one merger: Sears, Roebuck and Co., the 1893 Chicago mail-order house of Kenmore and Craftsman, and Sears Holdings Corporation, the 2005 Kmart merger company whose 2009 record counted some 3,900 stores - followed by the October 2018 Chapter 11 and the 2019 sale to Transformco. Saks Incorporated tells the same story in luxury miniature: a regional chain that bought Saks Fifth Avenue in 1998, sold everything else, and was itself acquired by Hudson's Bay in 2013. Spiegel reaches further back still - founded 1865, first catalog 1905, gone in 2019 - while Selfridges, the letter's British entry, still trades on Oxford Street under its fourth set of owners since Harry Selfridge.

Then read the closures with dates, because this directory keeps them as history rather than deleting them: Shopko (all stores closed June 23, 2019, after a January bankruptcy filing), Stage Stores (Chapter 11 in May 2020, its stores liquidated into a Gordmans conversion that never finished) and Sequential Brands (Chapter 11 in August 2021, its AND1, Avia and Jessica Simpson brands sold to new owners). Beside them stand the letter's private-equity-era survivors: Skechers, taken private by 3G Capital in September 2025 after reaching $8.97 billion in sales, and Spanx, majority-sold to Blackstone in 2021 at a $1.2 billion valuation.

Finish with the companies most readers never meet. Sovereign Sky and Spectraa Lingerie are the sourcing trade in its own words - Pasadena knitwear factories and Tirupur inspection routines, AQL tables and all - and SPESA speaks for the machinery suppliers behind every sewing floor. Surf Expo's record runs from rented hotel rooms in Virginia Beach in 1975 to 2,400 booths in Orlando; StyleCareers has listed fashion jobs since 2001; and Style.com's dated 2007 news items preserve the exact season the runway moved online, before its coverage became Vogue Runway and its name was sold to Farfetch. No other letter in this directory holds the whole industry - store, brand, factory, machine and marketplace - quite so completely.