Esprit Holdings
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For other meanings of "Esprit", see Esprit (disambiguation).
Esprit Holdings Limited SEHK: 330 LSE: EPT is a publicly owned manufacturer of apparel, footwear, accessories, jewellery, and housewares, under the ESPRIT label. The company is headquartered and managed from Ratingen, Germany, while the Financial- and IR-Office remains in Kowloon, Hong Kong. The company has stores in more than forty countries. The ESPRIT brand name is also licensed to other manufacturers. In addition, the Group owns the Red Earth cosmetics brand. The brand was particularly popular in the 1980s (Especially with suburban teenagers). It still remains quite popular with people of the middle income classes, due to its purified and classy image, especially in Germany, which is the biggest single market for the brand.
The company was started in San Francisco in the 1960s by Susie Russell (now Susie Tompkins Buell) and her then-husband, Douglas Tompkins, the founder of The North Face. They were joined in 1971 by Michael Ying. The couple divorced in 1989, and Mr. Tompkins sold his shares in 1990. Later, the Esprit Far East Group bought the other divisions and formed Esprit Holdings Limited in Hong Kong. The company acquired Red Earth in 2001.
The company is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and is a component of the Hang Seng Index. It has been a listed company in Hong Kong since 1993 and has a secondary listing on the London Stock Exchange since December 1998.
Its shares are a component of the following stock market indices:
- Hang Seng Index
- Morgan Stanley's MSCI Hong Kong
- FTSE All World Index for Hong Kong
- S&P/HKEx LargeCap Index
- S&P Asia 50
