Dressbarn history

In mid-1966, the company’s holdings were incorporated as Dress Barn, Inc.

1983: The Dress Barn goes public.

By the end of 1984, the company possessed 157 stores, after the acquisition of 46 Off the Rax stores, eight stores from The Gap, and the addition of three new Dress Barn stores.

The year 1985 saw the company begin to earn national recognition, as Forbes magazine ranked Dress Barn number 42 out of the Top-200 Small Companies in the United States.

Also in 1990, Dress Barn purchased JRL Consulting Corporation for $2.56 million.

Also in 1994, Dress Barn issued its own credit card to the public, and soon thereafter over half a million cards were in circulation.

Dress Barn 35th Anniversary Video, Suffern, N.Y.: Dress Bam, Inc., 1997.

The chain eventually peaked at some 775 stores, but this number dropped to 680 by mid-1998 due to closures of poorly performing stores.

The shift impacted Dress Barn's bottom line in 1999, when sales increased 3 percent to $616 million but net income fell 17.1 percent to $33.3 million.

The company planned to resume Internet sales during fiscal 2003.

Its 2015 acquisition of Ann, Inc., owner of the Ann Taylor and Loft chains, made it one of the country’s largest apparel retailers—and one of the most dependent on the health of mall real estate, with 5,000 stores, most of them in shopping malls.

In 2017, just two years after the Ann Taylor acquisition, it was obvious that Ascena had too many stores and too few customers.