🠈 Ascena Retail Group 🠊
Ascena Retail Group
Ascena Retail Group began its life as Dress Barn. The company acquired numerous other retailers and decided it wanted to ditch a name with pastoral implications and adopted the name Ascena in 2010.
The company took on a huge debt load during its acquisition spree and fell into bankruptcy during the COVID19 pandemic. They sold the IP for Dress Barn and appear to be consolidating their other brands.
Ascena Time line
I drew the first part of the time line from Funding Universe and the latter part from a variety of sources including wikipedia.
- 1962: Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe opened their first store in Stamford, Ct.
- 1966: The stores incorporated as The Dress Barn, Inc..
- 1983: Dress Barn held its IPO on the NASDAQ with symbol DBRN.
- 1984: Dress Barn grew to 100 locations.
- 1985: Dress Barn had 200 locations.
- 1989: Dress Barn added plus-size clothing.
- 1990: JRL Consulting Corporation acquired Dress Barn.
- 2000: Dress Barn reduced inventory to its private-label brand.
- 2004: Dress Barn acquired Duluth based Maurices which had 464 stores in 38 states.
- 2011: Dress Barn changed its name to Ascena Retail Group and its symbol to ASNA.
- 2012: Ascena acquired Charming Shoppes which had 1,857 stores for $890 million
History of Charming Shoppes
- 2019: London-based OpCapita bought a majority stake in Maurices which was valued at $300 million.
- 2020: Ascena Group declared bankruptcy.
- 2020: Ascena closed all 544 DressBarn.
- 2020: Retail Ecommerce Ventures acquired the IP of DressBarn to create an online only shop.
- 2020: Ascena filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy and announced the closure of Catherines and Lou & Grey stores.
- 2020: Ascena sold Ann Taylor, LOFT, Lou & Gray and Lane Bryant to Sycamore Partners.
References:
- Funding Universe - Dress Barn (Drawn 11/17/2020)
- Wikipedia - Ascena Retail Group (Drawn 11/17/2020)
- RIS Webinar - Dress Barn Parent Acquires Charming Shoppes (Drawn 11/18/2020)
- Dress Barn - Press Release (Drawn 11/18/2020)