Tabar Inc, a private label technical sport glove design and production firm which has served the outdoor and sports market place for more than 30 years, and Fownes Bros, a 236-year-old company serving the fashion dress leather and sport casual market, have announced plans to join forces and share resources in a new strategic partnership.
Gary Schloss, President of Tabar, explains that the two highly regarded firms service two spectrums of the hand wear category. Tabar has strengths in the more technical areas of the outdoor market, with an emphasis on complex technical design and fabric sourcing. Fownes is an innovator and fashion leader in the broader cold weather accessory retail market. Coupled with Fownes’ sourcing offices and wholly owned factories in Asia, a strategic alliance will allow both companies shared resources to best serve both ends of the market, say the companies.
“The line between technical sport and fashion has blurred over the years. Consumers have come to expect both qualities when it comes to product. A strategic alliance makes this expectation a seamless reality,” said Even Dunlop, Principal and C.O.O. of Fownes Bros.
Additionally, Fownes’ leather glove heritage coupled with Tabar’s technical expertise allows for expansion into new market segments and product categories, he continued.
The two firms plan to maintain their individual locations and will begin to leverage each other’s strengths to offer a more expanded level of service and resources to their respective clients immediately. The firms have collaborated with each other over the years and saw this alliance as a real opportunity to take this relationship to a higher level.
Gary Schloss adds, “Both the teams at Tabar and Fownes have always found interesting ways to work together and there are definite synergies to working more closely to the benefit of the client bases. This allows Tabar to utilize the factory direct model for the types of gloves that Fownes is famous for delivering as well as access to a larger back office, sourcing and production support system.
“Sometimes bigger can be better and we will begin to launch some new initiatives starting early in 2014,” said Schloss.
