Spy

I never learned why SPY went public in the first place all those years ago.  I imagine it was because a group of people who may not quite have understood the industry saw potential fast growth and a chance to make a lot of money.  Those were different times.  I have some experience with that […]

This isn’t the kind of thing I usually choose to write about.  After some thought, I wanted to express how sad I was to hear about the recent passing of SPY CEO Seth Hamot.  For years before I met Seth, I gave him a hard time.  As a public company, SPY was a valuable source

You may remember that until a few months ago Spy, as a public company, was releasing the usual filings and I was analyzing them.  But they stopped releasing them and, though still public, its shares are now traded on the OTC pink sheets under the symbol XSPY. As I wrote every quarter, I always liked

SPY filed a form 15-12G with the Security and Exchange Commission on December 11th. The press release that accompanied the filing stated, “As a result of this filing, the Company ’ s obligations to file certain reports with the SEC, including annual, quarterly and current reports on Form 10-K, Form 10-Q and Form 8-K, respectively,

I’m going to try and keep this pretty short. Nothing has really changed strategically. Spy is still in business only because its major shareholder has lent the company around $20 million. In terms of operations and expense management, they’ve done everything that I can see they can do. They tried to stake out a differentiable

As usual, I’ll start off my discussion of SPY by saying how much I like the brand and how I think they’ve done most of the right things in terms of operations and brand positioning. But then I move on to the financials (the June 30 quarter in this case) and bemoan, as I have

I have admired SPY for the organizational, strategic positioning, and expense control changes they’ve implemented in the last couple of years. But there’s a limit to how far you can reduce expenses. After that, SPY has to find ways to increase sales or its gross margin to find a way out from under its $21.5

As I’ve written before, I have a lot of respect for how SPY has restructured and repositioned itself. There seems to be an alignment of their corporate culture and market positioning that not only has the potential to differentiate the brand (in their market), but to save money and increase the efficiency of the organization.

Last time I wrote about SPY (see it here) in August, they had reported a quarter over quarter sales decline of 18.1% from $10 million to $8.2 million. They told us their largest retail sunglass customer had stopped carrying their brand in the quarter that ended June 30. But in that quarter’s 10Q they said

Long time readers have been through the saga of Spy with me. But for the last couple of years, they’ve pretty much done things right. They’ve cleaned up inventory, managed expenses down, focused on a niche they can compete in, strengthened the management team, done some innovative product things, gotten out of products that weren’t working, and