Last Updated: November 2000

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

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.

The G-III teaching case is currently 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@yale.edu, 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.

Image of G-III Leather Materials 
-rw-r--r--  1 ivo users  147691 Dec  3 11:53 giii-ab3.pdf
-rw-r--r--  1 ivo users  190340 Dec  3 11:52 giii-ab2.pdf
-rw-rw-r--  1 ivo users  257404 Dec  3 11:52 giii-ab.pdf
  • 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.
  • Last Update: regenerated pdf files in December 2004 to improve pdf conformity.
  • 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, scanned by Brigitta Schumacher (thanks!), in 3 parts, each about 700KB. Do not download this, unless you have a very good net connection! Part 1 (Pages 3-17), Part 2 (pages 18-32), Part 3 (pages 33-F15).
  • And, here is the case in Spanish, thanks to Carmelo de Las Morenasfrom the Centro de Estudios Garrigues.

Other IPO Information: See also my notes on IPOs at http://www.iporesources.org/

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