SuperGroup

"Superdry" redirects here. For the Japanese beer, see Asahi Super Dry.

SuperGroup

Type	Public
Traded as	LSE: SGP
Industry	Retail
Founded	1985
Headquarters	Cheltenham, Gloucestershire,UK
Key people	Peter Bamford, Chairman Euan Sutherland, CEO
Products	Clothing
Revenue	£430.9 million (2014)
Operating income	£61.5 million (2014)
Profit	£27.8 million (2014)
Website	www.supergroup.co.uk

SuperGroup plc is a British international branded clothing company, and owner of the Superdry label. Superdry products combine vintage Americana styling with Japanese inspired graphics. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange as a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.

History

Superdry fashion was established by Ian Hibbs and Julian Dunkerton in Cheltenham in 1985, at which time it was trading as "Cult Clothing". It expanded during the 1990s and established stores in a number of UK university towns and cities, from Oxford and Cambridge to Edinburgh and Belfast. It opened its first store under the Superdry name in Covent Garden in London in 2004.

File:Superdry regent street flag.JPG

Flag over the Regent Street Superdry Store in London

Under Theo Karpathios, a nationwide then global expansion of Superdry took place, with stores opening in major towns and cities all over the UK, the majority in university cities. As of 2012 the brand is sold in over 40 countries across Europe, North America, South America, the Middle East, Australia and Asia.

The business floated on the London Stock Exchange in March 2010. Dunkerton appeared in the Sunday Times Rich List 2010, and is said to be worth an estimated £180m.

The company issued a profits warning and placed its store opening plans under review in February 2012; the share price quickly dropped by 18%.

On 22 October 2014, it was announced that Dunkerton stepped down as CEO of Superdry and has been replaced by Euan Sutherland the ex-CEO of the Co-operative.

Image

Superdry does not overtly advertise and does not actively pursue celebrity endorsement, but a Brad leather jacket worn by football player David Beckham sold 70,000 from 2007 to mid-2009, becoming a best-seller for the company.

The company's products include frequently meaningless excerpts of Japanese text, inspired by the common Japanese practise of placing decorative English text on items to increase their fashionability and appeal, a phenomenon known as Engrish. The company explained to a Japanese television crew in 2011 that they deliberately use simple machine translation to generate Japanese text, and that they are aware that the texts often have no meaning. The Japanese text incorporated in the brand's logo—極度乾燥(しなさい) (kyokudo kansō (shinasai))—literally translates as "Maximum dry (please do)", the text in brackets being due to the translation software used offering alternatives depending on whether dry is intended as a noun (e.g., super dryness) or an imperative, (e.g., dry this shirt out).