One vendor accounts for 20.6 percent of everything The Buckle sells.
Not a brand you have heard of. Not Levi’s, not Wrangler, not 7 For All Mankind, all of which it carries.
A company called Axis Denim, which makes the jeans that go out under The Buckle’s own labels.
One in five dollars. From one supplier. Making product with the store’s name on it.
That single line in the annual report explains how a chain of 440 stores, most of them inside shopping malls in an era when malls are supposedly finished, earned a 20.2 percent operating margin and paid out $225 million in dividends last year.
It also explains why the company does not hold store-wide sales. Ever.