Last Updated: August 2010

Ivo Welch, The G-III Apparel Group, Inc. Teaching Case

G-III leather

G-III is a NYC-based apparel company that went public in December 1989. It has been (and continues to be) the leading leather outerwear company in the United States. Unlike many other publicly traded apparel companies, G-III has survived the major worldwide depression in apparel of the early 1990's. Although the case is old, it is still relevant—access to the teaching note is tightly controlled, and the issues have not changed.

The G-III teaching case is used by dozens of instructors all over the world. There is a ~25 page teaching note for the G-III case, with references to academic companion work, detailed suggestions as to how to teach this case and answers to the questions posed on the final page of the case, and a postscript on G-III itself. I believe the G-III case to have many unique and very valuable aspects, which cannot be easily found in competitive cases on IPOs. (This is why I wrote this case to begin with.) If you are an instructor at a business school or economics department, and you are interested in using this case for teaching, please send me an email with your affiliation and the course in which you are planning to use this case to ivo.welch@gmail.com, so I will forward the teaching note to you. (I am strictly controlling access to the teaching note in order to avoid student circulation.)

There are now four versions of this case. They can be downloaded (below) in Adobe Acrobat format. I recommend instructors to consider the full or abbrev-1 version, as explained in my teaching note.

  • The unabbreviated G-III case: giii-fl.pdf. 34 pages (+cover). 253,725 bytes.
  • The abbreviated1 G-III case: giii-ab1.pdf. Omits industry details. 26 pages (+cover). 226,670 bytes.
  • The abbreviated2 G-III case: giii-ab2.pdf. Further omits company and management detail, and selection of comparables. 19 pages (+cover). 190,107 bytes.
  • The abbreviated3 G-III case: giii-ab3.pdf. Further omits "IPO market at 1989" section. 15 pages (+cover), of which 3 pages are a reproduction of the first pages of the IPO prospectus. 147,457 bytes.
  • A collection of color images of G-III company products, scanned from the IPO prospectus. (These images are about 200KB each. They can be saved and printed. They make great overhead slides for introducing the case to students.)
  • The full G-3 IPO prospectus in 3 parts, each about 700KB: Part 1 (Pages 3-17), Part 2 (pages 18-32), Part 3 (pages 33-F15).
  • After the case is done, you can read about what happened to G-III over the next two decades. Although this has little relevance one way or another for the specific issues raised in the case, you should find it interesting.
  • And, here is the case in Spanish, thanks to Carmelo de Las Morenas from the Centro de Estudios Garrigues.

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