Article Excerpt:
TWST: What is Claire's Stores?Ms. Schaefer: Claire's Stores is a chain of moderately priced costume jewelry and accessory stores found throughout the world, targeting teen and tween customers. We started here in the United States, and over the past 10 years we have been expanding globally. We offer great value and a great selection of everything from costume jewelry to accessories, which include handbags, hair ornaments, key rings, room accessories and other fun stuff. The company has been in business over 30 years. Claire's was actually created by my dad, Rowland Schaefer, who bought a small chain of accessory stores; at the time they were actually millinery stores in enclosed malls based in the Midwest. In the early 1970s, as the millinery business began to decline, he saw the future in accessories and began to transform the stores. In the early 1980s, he did a secondary stock offering and raised money to aggressively roll out the concept. Between the early 1980s and the early 1990s, we actually grew to approximately 1,000 stores in the US, Canada and the Caribbean. In 1996, we bought a small chain of stores in the UK, and we now have approximately 450 stores in the UK and Ireland. In 1998, we bought a 50 store chain in Switzerland, Austria and Germany, which we have grown to just over 100 stores. In 2000, we bought another small chain of 40 stores in France called Cleopatre that we converted to Claire's, and we now have approximately 180 stores in France. So the total in Europe is about 730 stores right now, almost all of which operate under the Claire's name. We also have two other store concepts, which at the moment operate only in North America. Our 450 Icing by Claire's stores offer similar merchandise with a more sophisticated look and cater to women 17-27 versus our Claire's Stores, where our key customer demographic is seven to 17 years of age. We are also testing a third concept, called Claire's Club, which is targeted at children between the ages of 0-6.
Tickers included in this excerpt: CLE
TWST Newsletter
For more information call (212) 952 7433. The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does not make stock recommendations.