Lee is owned by Kontoor Brands (the United States, NYSE: KTB), which was separated from VF Corporation on 23 May 2019.[1][2] Before Kontoor Brands, Lee was owned by VF Corporation from 1969 to 2019.[2]
Lee was founded in Kansas in 1889 and introduced the zip fly to workwear in 1926 and the Union-All coverall in 1913. It is one of the three original American denim brands alongside Levi's and Wrangler, and is particularly strong in Asia.
What Kontoor Brands's annual report says about Lee
Sentences about Lee from Kontoor Brands's latest annual filing[1], copied word for word.
Our Wrangler and Lee brands offer lifestyle denim, apparel, footwear and accessories in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, EMEA and APAC through our wholesale and direct-to-consumer businesses and through licensing arrangements.
Deep Relationships With Leading Brick-and-Mortar and E-Commerce Retailers The Wrangler and Lee brands have long-term relationships with many leading brick-and-mortar and e-commerce retailers, including Amazon, Boot Barn, Target, and Walmart, whom we believe rely on these iconic brands, leading product quality and innovation to address evolving consumer needs in our product categories.
How often Kontoor Brands names Lee in its annual report
A plain count of the times the name appears in the text of each annual report, not counting the start of a sentence. A brand that an owner writes about more is usually one it treats as central. The brand is named more often than it was three years earlier.
Kontoor Brands is a publicly listed company headquartered in Greensboro, North Carolina, United States, founded in 2019. Brandtree records 3 brands under its control, and it is listed as NYSE: KTB.
Kontoor Brands is the denim business VF Corporation spun off in 2019, taking Wrangler and Lee out of a portfolio that had shifted towards outdoor and activewear. It is one of the largest jeanswear companies in the world by units sold.
Brandtree records a controlling owner for 2,549 brands that began in the United States.
478 of them (19%) are now controlled by a company headquartered in another country; Lee is not one of them.
Kontoor Brands agreed to sell the Lee jeans brand to an affiliate of Authentic Brands Group for up to $1 billion: $750 million in cash at closing and up to $250 million more in an earnout. It would leave Kontoor with Wrangler and Helly Hansen, and put Lee with the brand-licensing group that already owns Nautica and Brooks Brothers and licenses its names to operators rather than making the clothes itself.
VF Corporation spun off its jeanswear business as Kontoor Brands, distributing shares to VF shareholders. The separation let VF concentrate on outdoor and activewear brands growing faster than denim, and gave Wrangler and Lee a management team focused on that category alone.
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