MIAMI — August 13, 2018 — Perry Ellis International Inc. announced today that it has entered into a new license agreement with Fashion Footwear LLC granting rights to design and distribute Havanera™ flip flops and casual footwear for men, women, boys and girls in the U.S. and Canada. Targeted distribution will include department and specialty stores as well as military exchanges and e-commerce with an expected launch in Spring 2019.

Havanera is a Latin-inspired brand, blending nostalgic allure and contemporary design. We’ve gone back to our roots, taking authentic design inspiration from the traditional Guayabera and translated the look into relaxed, sophisticated apparel and accessories ideal for a casual lifestyle.

“We look forward to working with Fashion Footwear, LLC and offering attractive and stylish tropical product for our customers while continuing to expand our global reach,” commented Oscar Feldenkreis, CEO and President of Perry Ellis International.

Fashion Footwear President Morris Abraham added: “We are delighted to partner with Perry Ellis International to extend our brand portfolio to include Havanera, a premier, tropical lifestyle brand. We intend to capture the energy and excitement of Havana in our assortment of flip flops and casual footwear for the whole family.”

Posted August 13, 2018

Source: Perry Ellis International Inc.

GREENSBORO, N.C. — August 13, 2018 — VF Corp. today announced that its Board of Directors intends to separate the company into two independent, publicly traded companies: VF Corp., a global apparel and footwear powerhouse; and a yet-to-be named company (NewCo), which will hold VF’s Jeans and VF Outlet businesses and will be a global leader in the denim category. The company expects to create these companies through a tax-free spin-off of NewCo to VF’s shareholders.

“As shown by our recent quarterly results, VF continues to gain momentum on our transformation journey, marked by strong progress on our strategic initiatives and portfolio management,” said Steve Rendle, chairman, president and CEO. “With these strong foundations in place, we are now ideally positioned to create two independent, leading, global companies. In alignment with our strategic plan, the decision to separate these businesses will allow VF to sharpen its focus as a consumer-centric and retail-minded organization anchored in activity-based lifestyle brands. Our Jeans platform is a successful, sustainable business with iconic global brands and a clear path to value creation as a standalone entity. This exciting step forward will mean that both VF and NewCo have the resources, management focus and financial flexibility to thrive in a dynamic consumer marketplace, creating an even brighter future for both organizations and all of their stakeholders.”

Compelling Strategic Rationale

During the past several years, VF has undertaken a series of transformational portfolio actions that have driven superior value creation, including an annualized total shareholder return of more than 17 percent since 2000 – ranking the company in the top 10 percent of S&P 500 Index performers during that period.

In 2017, VF unveiled its five-year growth priorities. These included a disciplined reshaping of the brand portfolio to better position the company for long-term success in a quickly changing business landscape. Since then, VF has pursued a range of opportunities pivotal to its portfolio transformation, including the acquisitions of Williamson-Dickie, and the Icebreaker® and Altra® brands, and the divestitures of the Nautica® brand and the Licensed Sports Group, including the Majestic® brand. Through these actions, the company has sharpened its focus on activity-based outdoor, active and work lifestyles.

As VF continues implementing its 2021 strategic growth plan, its Board of Directors has consistently explored opportunities to enhance long-term shareholder value, and believes that separating these businesses into two, independent, publicly traded companies is the best path forward. The strategic priorities and financial characteristics of VF and NewCo have evolved over time and the synergies across these businesses have become less clear. Enabling the Jeans business to operate independently from VF will allow it to focus on its long-term strategic priorities and achieve even greater potential as a separate company with a separate management team.

The company believes the separation will offer several benefits:

• Both companies will benefit from enhanced strategic and management focus;
• Each company will benefit from reduced managerial and operational complexity;
• Both companies will be able to optimize their distinct capabilities and focus investment on independent growth priorities, positioning each for stronger, more sustainable value creation;
• Each company will have a flexible capital structure with the ability to fund targeted profitable growth; and
• The operational and financial profile of each company will more closely align with its natural investor type.

A More Focused VF

The separation will sharpen VF’s focus as a global apparel and footwear powerhouse with a portfolio of iconic brands in highly attractive and growing consumer segments and categories, leading to enhanced long-term revenue growth and margin expansion. With estimated annual revenue of more than $11 billion, the new VF will have a mid-teen total shareholder return target, including a strong dividend yield in line with the S&P 500. Building on VF’s successful track record of acquiring and accelerating brand growth, the separation will give the company more flexibility to pursue its M&A strategy, explore new growth vectors and apply even more investment behind its organic brand portfolio.

Consistent with its enhanced focus on the outdoor and active consumer, VF will move its global headquarters to the metro Denver area, which will also serve as the home for The North Face®, JanSport®, Smartwool®, Altra® and Eagle Creek® brands and both VF’s Global Innovation Center for technical fabrics and Digital Lab. The new Colorado location will be staffed by brand leaders and associates, innovation staff, certain members of VF’s global leadership team and other corporate functions.

“Locating these brands, along with select VF leaders, at the base of the Rocky Mountains will enable us to accelerate innovation, unlock collaboration across brands and functions, attract and retain talent and connect with consumers,” said Rendle, who will continue to lead VF.

A Global Leader in Denim

NewCo will be a global leader in the denim category, with iconic brands steeped in rich heritage and authenticity, including the Wrangler® and Lee® brands. The VF Outlet business will be part of NewCo’s portfolio.

With estimated annual revenue of more than $2.5 billion and a high single-digit total shareholder return target, NewCo will have an attractive financial profile, including a sustainable high dividend yield. NewCo will have a best-in-class supply chain, channel and category management expertise, reinforced by deep and long-standing relationships with leading global retailers. Additionally, NewCo will have diversified geographic exposure and plans to further extend its geographic footprint with a sharp focus on Asia, building on its established presence in China. NewCo also will have the opportunity to expand its distribution to new customers and categories, with a focus on both their owned and wholesale digital partner channels. NewCo expects to unlock significant scale and cost efficiencies by streamlining operations, providing flexibility to pursue strategic acquisitions over time.

The company also today announced the anticipated designation of Scott Baxter as Chief Executive Officer of NewCo and Rustin Welton as Chief Financial Officer, effective upon completion of the transaction.

“Scott is an extremely talented leader who has a long track record of success, which includes leading the Jeans business from 2011 through 2015, a period during which the business grew at a mid-single-digit rate,” said Rendle. “There’s no one more qualified and appropriate to serve as CEO than Scott. I am confident he will do an exceptional job as CEO of NewCo.”

The company plans to announce additional members of the NewCo executive team and further details on the composition of the Board of Directors ahead of the completion of the transaction.

NewCo’s global headquarters will be in Greensboro, N.C. The Lee® brand will move its headquarters to Greensboro from Kansas City, joining the Wrangler® brand.

Rendle added: “We’re proud of our Greensboro, N.C., roots and remain committed to the community, including a strong ongoing employment presence. Combined with the relocation of the Lee® brand from Kansas City and the establishment of a major new public company with Greensboro headquarters, we expect that total VF and NewCo employment in the area will remain at current levels.”

“This is great news for our associates, who will become part of two more sharply-focused, dynamic companies, with the ability to build even stronger partnerships with customers and deliver fantastic innovation for consumers,” he said. “I want to thank all of our outstanding colleagues for the extraordinary work they have done to get us to this point. Their talent, passion and hard work will allow both VF and NewCo to succeed long into the future.”

Next Steps

The separation is currently targeted to be completed in the first half of calendar 2019, subject to final approval by the company’s Board of Directors, customary regulatory approvals and tax and legal considerations. Throughout the separation process, VF management will remain committed to business as usual with all key stakeholders, including customers, employees and local communities.

Investor days will be held for both VF and NewCo during the first half of calendar 2019.

Barclays is acting as financial advisor to VF Corp. and Davis Polk and Wardwell LLP is acting as legal advisor.

Posted August 13, 2018

Source: VF Corporation

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — August 13, 2018 — X-Rite Inc. and Pantone LLC today announced that Epic Games’ Unreal Studio 4.20 natively supports the Appearance Exchange Format (AxF™). Developed by X-Rite, AxF is a vendor-neutral format that enables the communication of all aspects of a physical material’s appearance — color, texture, gloss, refraction, transparency, translucency, special effects (sparkles) and reflection properties — in a single, editable file to improve design virtualization. AxF allows Unreal Studio users to load physically-accurate digital material files, convert them to Unreal Engine materials for a consistent look across platforms and use them in a real-time workflow to enhance VR and AR experiences. X-Rite is showcasing the AxF integration with Unreal Studio 4.20 at SIGGRAPH 2018, August 12-16 in Vancouver at booth 401.

AxF is the foundational component of the X-Rite Total Appearance Capture (TAC™) ecosystem, a solution that brings a new level of accuracy and efficiency to the capture, communication and presentation of physical materials in the virtual world. Traditionally, the capture and rendering of complex materials such as special effects paints, meshes and synthetic fabrics have been time-consuming and manual processes. TAC addresses this challenge with a new level of precision in material scanning coupled with an ability to share the resulting data, via AxF, across an expanding set of tools, such as the Unreal Studio real-time visualization solution.

“Integration of AxF in Unreal answers the need of taking physically correct materials into real-time visualization,” said Dr. Francis Lamy, executive vice president and chief technology officer, X-Rite and Pantone. “The TAC ecosystem and AxF allow Unreal Engine users to visualize their creations using physically correct digital materials, providing a new level of realism that results in even more immersive AR and VR experiences.”

“Our customers who want to achieve the highest fidelity to real-world materials can now use the AxF format and scanners from X-Rite to bring measured materials into their UE4-based visualization process. The combination of Unreal Engine and AxF means customers can now better match the virtual world to the real world to make better design decisions,” said Ken Pimentel, Unreal Studio product manager, Epic Games.

Unreal Studio is a collection of targeted resources that accelerates adoption of Unreal Engine and new VR and AR experiences by simplifying workflows and optimizing data, delivering industry-relevant training and assets and providing timely support methods. The latest Unreal Studio 4.20 release focuses on a streamlined workflow that maximizes ease of use and compatibility through the Datasmith plugin. Users can now load X-Rite’s Appearance Exchange Format (AxF) files for an elegant conversion to Unreal Engine materials, resulting in a highly accurate, consistent look of materials across platforms.

AxF is a binary digital file format and is not restricted to a specific device or measurement geometry, spanning single spectrum to full BSSRDF. It is designed to compress raw data from terabytes to megabytes providing third party software applications, such as Unreal Studio, with efficient access to a full set of material appearance characteristics without compromising performance.

TAC Captures Physical Material Appearance at SIGGRAPH

SIGGRAPH 2018 attendees can see a demonstration of X-Rite’s award-winning Total Appearance Capture (TAC) ecosystem and the AxF integration with Unreal Studio at the X-Rite booth 401. Attendees will see how AxF files can be used within Unreal Studio software and applied to photo-realistic scenes and immersive AR and VR experience.

The TAC ecosystem is comprised of the TAC7 scanner, PANTORA™ Material Hub desktop application, and Virtual Light Booth (VLB). Physical material samples are scanned using the TAC7 scanner, which captures appearance properties digitally to create AxF files that store appearance data. The files are stored, managed, viewed and edited in the PANTORA desktop application. The AxF files can be shared with Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Computer-Aided Design (CAD), and state-of-the art rendering applications including Allegorithmic Substance Designer, AMD Radeon™ ProRender, Autodesk VRED™ Professional 2018, Chaos Group V-Ray, Epic Games Unreal Engine, Gerber Technology YuniquePLM and AccuMark, Human Solutions Assyst Vidya, Lumiscaphe Patchwork 3D, Luxion KeyShot®, Material Exchange platform, Next Limit Maxwell, and NVIDIA Iray®.

The Virtual Light Booth is the industry’s first immersive 3-D visualization environment for evaluating material appearance. It allows users to accurately compare physical samples and digital renderings side-by-side under the same perceptual conditions — from illumination to contextual to observational factors. This helps ensure consistency between digital prototypes and final physical products and empowers designers to make more informed material selection decisions reducing approval cycles and accelerating time to market.

Posted August 13, 2018

Source: X-Rite Inc.

DENVER – August 13, 2018 – VF Corp. — one of the world’s largest apparel, footwear and accessories companies and owner of outdoor brands including The North Face®, JanSport® and Smartwool® — is moving its global headquarters to Denver.

“We are thrilled to welcome a new partner that embodies the values that define Colorado,” said Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper. “VF’s move underscores the critical driver that the outdoor recreation industry plays in our economy where business meets lifestyle.”

VF Corporation becomes the latest Fortune 250 to call Colorado home.

“Colorado is an area with an unrivalled heritage and culture of outdoor and activity-based lifestyles, as well as a thriving business environment,” said Steve Rendle, VF’s chairman, president and CEO. “It is a great strategic fit for our business, and we are excited to be relocating our headquarters and several brands to the metro Denver area next year. We believe that the creation of our new headquarters in the area will help us to unlock collaboration across our outdoor brands, attract and retain talent, and accelerate innovation.”

Rendle added: “We are grateful to Colorado for the job growth tax credits that represent a long-term commitment to our company and we want to make a long-term commitment to the people of Colorado. For every dollar of job growth tax credit that we receive and use, we will match that dollar in a donation to the VF Foundation and designate those funds to support the charitable interests of the citizens of Colorado. VF’s Purpose Statement declares that we will power movements of sustainable and active lifestyles for the betterment of people and our planet. We will demonstrate that commitment to the Colorado community.”

About 85 VF leaders, including members of the company’s U.S.-based senior leadership team, will move to Colorado beginning in Spring 2019. Over the course of the next two years, several of VF’s Outdoor brands, including The North Face®, JanSport®, Smartwool®, Eagle Creek® and Altra® also will relocate to join VF.

In total, approximately 800 employees across VF and its brands are expected to move into the new metro Denver area headquarters beginning in mid-2019, including about 70 from the Smartwool® brand, which already calls Colorado home and is currently headquartered in Steamboat Springs.

“This project is strong validation of the State’s role as a leading attractor of industry and it is especially heartening that it comes with VF — a company whose brands and culture align with Colorado’s core values,” said Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade Executive Director Stephanie Copeland.

VF has nearly 70,000 employees worldwide and operations across more than 170 countries. The company’s portfolio of brands also includes Vans®, Timberland® and a stable of workwear brands, including Dickies®, none of which are involved in the relocation to Denver. The company’s 2017 global revenues were $11.8 billion.

Posted August 13, 2018

Source: VF Corp.

LOS ANGELES — August 11, 2018 — Tukatech has launched clean air filtration and lowest energy consumption TUKAcut cutting systems, certified by the TÜV SÜD Italia Machine Energy Protocol MEP. The Italian-made machines are customized with Tukatech’s software, and mechanical and electrical specifications to ensure TUKAcut is an unmatched cutting room solution.

TUKAcut machines for lingerie, denim, and universal fabric cutting are available in custom widths and heights. These machines are designed to give the ultimate performance at the lowest running cost. Though cutting productivity is at least 20-percent higher than other models on the market, the energy cost is 50- to 70-percent lower, which is a great benefit for users in countries where energy cost is a major consideration.

Other features include the highest productivity per hour cutting denim with zero buffer, as well as a cut path optimizer that results in 2.2- to 3.6-percent fabric savings compared to other cutting machines and helps to increase productivity. The eco-power vacuum system guarantees considerable power savings at only 5.5 kW, the lowest in comparable industry cutting machines.

The new fabric cutting machines were first installed in Lahore, Pakistan, at Combined Fabrics, the largest supplier of knit garments to Levi’s. Before installation, the cutting room had 90 people cutting 50,000 units in a day. Sheikh Tariq Mehmood, director of Combined Fabrics, explained that the company was already, “very happy users of TUKAcad, TUKA3D, and SMARTmark. Tukatech demonstrated their cutting room expertise by helping us engineer another vendor’s cutting system before we even considered adopting TUKAcut for automatic fabric cutting.”

Implementation included training personnel for raw material handling, spreading, cutting, and bundling. On the first day of installation, 14 people were able to cut the same number of units (50,000), and within weeks the same configuration increased productivity to between 65,000 and 75,000 units per day.

Mehmood continued: “My suggestion is to listen to Tukatech’s expertise. Our expectations for the TUKAcut system were exceeded by far, but they never surprised us with extra hidden expenses.” Tukatech is known throughout the apparel industry for their personal customer service and transparent value models.

Ram Sareen, founder of Tukatech, explains that he chose the same mechanical solutions from Italian fabric cutting machine manufacturer, F.K. Group. Tukatech was the first partner of F.K. Group to take such machines out of Italy in 1995. Many of the machines installed in the US, Mexico, Canada, and India at that time are still running and producing high quality cuts. The new TUKAcut machine is a Tukatech original cutting solution and allows Tukatech to offer garment manufacturers reliable fabric cutting machines at competitive prices. “Similar to engineering companies like AMG partnering with Daimler-Benz to offer an amazingly high-performance vehicle to drivers who appreciate the engineering, we offer just the same with our partnership with F.K. Group,” comments Ram Sareen.

Posted August 11, 2018

Source: Tukatech