When Bugle Boy Industries filed for bankruptcy last month, Howard I. Finelt took notice. The company’s former marketing executive was not surprised. “I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner,” said Finelt, former vice president for licensing at the Simi Valley-based jeans maker. “It’s been coming for the last few years, but I’m sad to see it go.” Finelt, who left the company two years ago, has little doubt of where the fault lies. Finelt said the once powerful label was but a shell of itself in the last few years under the leadership of company co-founder and Chief Executive Officer William Mow. Furrowing his brow, the gray-haired Finelt is troubled by the end of a once-popular label whose brand became a classic through its TV commercials featuring a provocative young woman asking a man, “Are those Bugle Boy Jeans you’re wearing?”A veteran marketing, product licensing and consumer products expert, Finelt spent three years with Bugle Boy, helping push its licensing revenue from $2 million to $50 million during his tenure. Besides Bugle Boy, Finelt has worked for the Walt Disney Co. and others before arriving at Intellectual Property Management, LLC in North Hollywood, a brand licensing consulting firm where he now serves as its executive director. “There were a lot of things that went wrong,” Finelt said of Bugle Boy. “(Mow) did not allow the proper marketing of the business. It was all ego and it caused the demise of this company.” Mow, who has since resigned from the company, did not return repeated telephone calls by the Business Journal. Bugle Boy has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and agreed to sell most of its wholesale operations to Miami-based Perry Ellis International, liquidating its remaining assets, including 300 stores. At one time, the company employed about 3,500 people. Most, if not all, have lost their jobs. “That’s the real shame of this whole thing,” Finelt said. The privately-held company posted $423 million in sales last year, with $154 million coming from its wholesale operations. According to court documents, the company owes $75 million to Foothill Capital Corp. and General Credit Corp., with an additional $30 million to several other lenders. The company’s demise marks an end to a once high-flying label that began 25 years ago when Mow, marketing specialist Vincent Nesi and businessman Stanley Buchthal started the apparel brand. Insiders point fingers at Mow, but analysts also insist the vagaries of the jeans market didn’t help. Harvey Robinson, an equity analyst for the Chapman Co. in Baltimore, said Bugle Boy’s troubles are typical of so-called third-tier apparel makers who are being squeezed out of a shrinking market. “They can’t compete with in-house labels and other national brands,” he said. “But it’s still a viable label for Perry Ellis which should do well with it.” Perry Ellis markets a number of brands, including its namesake label, John Henry, Pro-Player and Munsingwear. With revenue of $600 million in 1995, the company seemed poised to make a run at top gun jeans maker Levi Strauss & Co. But just six years later, Bugle Boy is history and its rapid decline still has many shaking their heads. “It was a great company with a lot of very talented people and it’s very sad to see it go,” said Joseph Shannon, former president of the company’s retail division. Shannon, like Finelt, saw firsthand how the company’s fortunes were eclipsed by a series of bad management decisions that came directly from the top. After a falling out with then-company president Vincent Nesi, Mow forced him out in 1995 and replaced him with Mow’s wife, Rose, who then headed manufacturing. (Buchthal left the company early in its history.) “It was a terrible decision because she had no background, no training to lead a company,” Shannon said. “It was just Bill Mow running things and she was just a figurehead and it didn’t work.” The change at the top, giving Mow complete power over the company, would soon have dire consequences as Bugle Boy’s business strategy shifted to offering its merchandise in mid-level department stores like Sears and Mervyns instead of the higher-end stores. Further complicating things was Mow’s 1995 decision to open 180 stores in low-end malls and compete against the department stores that had long supported the label. “He just wouldn’t listen. He wasn’t the type of personality that you could ask, ‘Why are we going in this direction?’ He never listened and he did a lot of things on his own,” Finelt said. Often invited to sit with Mow during flights to business functions on his private plane, Finelt felt he had Mow’s ear. But his role as confidante to Mow ended abruptly in April 1997 after his photo turned up in a Los Angeles Times article outlining the company’s new line of school uniforms. Mow was unavailable on short notice, so Finelt agreed to pose for the picture. “I thought he’d be pleased that we got on the front page, but he went ballistic,” Finelt said. “He says to me, ‘So, (you’re) the star.’ It was bad.” Within a year, Finelt and a number of other top managers were gone. “He was the kind of man who just wouldn’t listen to you,” said Shannon, who headed the company’s retail division for four years. “The man had a humongous ego and that was the problem.” Bugle Boy continued to use its factories in Asia and Latin America, which were fine for the standard Bugle Boy line of low-end apparel but proved inadequate with the double-stitched, higher-end Bugle Boy Classics. The decline in sales continued in 1997 and even began to affect its boys and toddler lines, winners since they were introduced in the 1980s. At about the same time, Mow brought his daughter to the company to lead its marketing efforts, effectively removing Finelt and others responsible for the still-memorable “Are those Bugle Boy Jeans you’re wearing?” campaign. The company continued to push the Classics line while attempting to prop up the under-performing children’s line. Without Nesi (now CEO of his own New York licensing firm, Nesi Apparel) to market and push the brand, Bugle Boy stumbled through much of 1999 and 2000, suffering severe cash flow problems, oftentimes missing payments to suppliers as consumers began staying away from the once popular brand. Mark Brutzkus, an attorney who represents eight manufacturers owed millions by Bugle Boy, said the company has failed to pay many of its creditors for some time. So, with declining revenue and little hope of bolstering sales in a highly competitive casual apparel market, Mow filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and resigned as CEO. Before he left, he named Kenneth C. Harris interim chief executive to oversee the company’s liquidation of assets.