🠈 Sycamore Partners 🠊
Sycamore Partners
Sycamore Partners is a spin off of Golden Gate Capital with about $15 billion under management in 2019.
Corporate History
The fund was created by Stefan Kaluzny and Peter Morrow. This section lists corporate transactions that I encounter in my research of who owns what in the community.
- 2011: Golden Gate Partners spun off Sycamore.
- 2011-12: SP acquired Talbots from Golden Gate.
- 2015: Sycamore acquired Belk which is a chain of department stores in the South.2
History of Belk
Belk (belk.com) is a chain of departmernt stores in the South. The interesting thing about its history is that the chain evolved as partnerships between different store developers. They had a complex structure with over 350 different legal entities. It sounds like an interesting case study of distributed ownership. The company consolidated into a single monolithic company which fell into the hands of private equity firms.
- 1888: William Henry Belk opened a store in Monroe, NC which he called New York Racket and later renamed Belk Brothers.
- 1909: The company moved to Charloot with a flagship store on Trade and Tryon Street.
- 1921: Belk formed a partnership with Leggett Bros in South Boston.
- 1947: The Belk-Jones partnership with Earl Jones Sr. began expanding West of the Mississippi.
- 1990: The family of stores had a complex network involving over 350 legal entities with different partnership agreements.
- 1998: The company formed Belk, Inc which combined 112 companies into a single company.
- 2005: Belk purchased 47 Proffitt and McRae stores from Saks Fith Avenue which they converted to Belks.
- 2006: Belk purchased 38 Parisian stores from Saks.
- 2017: Sycamore bought the Intellectual Property of The Limited from L Brands. The Limited had filed bankruptcy and closed all stores. Sycamore assigned the name to Belk which offers a line of clothes with The Limited Brand.
- 2020: Sycamore acquired Ann Taylor, LOFT, Lou & Grey and Lane Bryant from Ascena which had declared chapter 11.
- 2021: Belk declared chapter 11 to reorganize debt and established credit lines with KKR and Blackstone Credit.4
References:
- Wikipedia - Sycamore Parterns (Drawn 11/4/2019)
- Wikipedia - Belk (Drawn 11/4/2019)
- Digital Commerce - Sycamore Partners Buys The Limited (Drawn 11/4/2019)
- Belk PR - 2021 bankruptcy (Drawn 11/29/2022)
Directory Listings:
- Internet Rivers - Private Equity Firms: Sycamore Partners