Casual Male Has Solid Quarter, Will Blur Product Lines

Add Casual Male Retail Group to the list of apparel marketers that managed inventory levels, reduced promotional and discount activity and boosted their margins.

For the quarter, Casual Male’s sales slipped to just under $95 million from $97.6 million in first-quarter 2009. But it kept the cost of its goods sold down – this dropped from $56 million to $51.4 million. The company trimmed its selling, general and administrative expenses by $1.5 million as well: This fell from $37.2 million to $35.6 million.

As a result, the company’s net income rose from $336,000 in first-quarter 2009 to $4.2 million for the quarter ended May 1 of this year.

This fiscal year will see the rollout of a new retail concept for Casual Male. The company will debut its Destination XL brand, which will feature superstores that offer merchandise from all of its retail lines, including Casual Male XL, Rochester Clothing and B&T Factory Direct, as well as its Shoes XL and Living XL lines.

In conjunction with the new retail concept, Casual Male also plans to launch an e-commerce site which will combine its retail lines into a single online location.

“This will enable our customers to shop across all of our brands and product extensions with ease and will bring all of our customers under one concept,” the company wrote in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. “Their classification as a ‘Rochester’ customer or a ‘Casual Male’ customer will no longer limit their ability to access our full-product assortment.”