A label grown inside a department store, not bought from outside.

Charter Club is not a mill brand or a company that was later bought by a retailer. It is a private brand — a name owned and sold by the department store Macy’s, found on its women’s clothing and on its sheets, towels and other bedding. Its history is therefore the history of a store’s merchandising strategy rather than of a factory or a founder’s workshop.

WWD, in its obituary of the former Macy’s chief Edward Finkelstein published in June 2014, credits him with starting the brand. Finkelstein joined Macy’s as a young man, became president of Macy’s California in 1969 and head of Macy’s New York in 1973, and in 1980 became chairman and chief executive of the whole company, then called R. H. Macy & Co. “In the Eighties,” WWD wrote, Finkelstein “started developing private brands, such as INC, Charter Club and Alfani, that have endured.”

The same obituary quotes his reasoning. Many of the store’s senior merchants opposed the idea, he said, but he “thought it was very important we have a certain percentage of business that distinguished us from other department stores, that gave us some separate meaning.” WWD also describes him developing The Cellar, the in-store housewares and food floor at Macy’s San Francisco and later at Herald Square in Manhattan, and treating Macy’s as a group of specialty shops under one roof.

Finkelstein took that idea outside the store as well. According to WWD, he created actual specialty stores called Aéropostale and Charter Club; neither took off as a chain during his tenure, the paper wrote. Macy’s filed for bankruptcy in 1992, six years after a 1986 leveraged buyout, and Finkelstein left the company a few months later, WWD reported.

From R. H. Macy & Co. to Federated and back to Macy’s, Inc.

The brand outlived the company that created it. According to English Wikipedia’s article on Macy’s, Inc., Federated Department Stores — the Cincinnati group that already owned Bloomingdale’s — took over Macy’s in 1994, and in 2007 Federated itself was renamed Macy’s, Inc. Charter Club therefore passed to Federated with the Macy’s business and is now owned by Macy’s, Inc., the company that renamed itself after the store.

Under Federated, Charter Club’s name was also attached to luxury bedding. In June 2003 the St. Petersburg Times described a new linen boutique at Macy’s Manhattan flagship whose luxury bedding, including silk coverlets, Italian-made duvets and pillowcases advertised in design magazines such as Elle Decor, was sold “under one of Macy’s own private brands, ‘Hotel Collection by Charter Club.’” The paper presented it as part of a wider push by department stores to raise the quality, price and prominence of their own labels,, and quoted Federated’s chief executive, Terry Lundgren, on the company’s plans to sell more goods under its own labels. Federated then owned Burdines and Bloomingdale’s as well as Macy’s, the paper noted.

The Hotel name later stood on its own. WWD, reporting in September 2011 on the retirement of Janet Grove, who chaired the Macy’s Merchandising Group from 1999 to 2009, said that group oversaw the design, sourcing and marketing of Macy’s private brands across apparel, home textiles and housewares, and called Grove the driving force behind Hotel, the store’s private home brand.

Packs, tags and store brands.

Towels, sheets and bedding are sold mostly through packaging and labels rather than through the product itself. A bath towel usually reaches the shelf folded and banded with a paper wrap or a hang tag, while sheets and pillowcases are sold in a clear bag, a printed sleeve or a card-backed pack that shows the size, the fibre and the colour name at a glance.

Once the wrapping is thrown away, the brand lives on in the sewn-in label: a small woven or printed tag in a hem or a seam that carries the name, the fibre content and the care instructions. For many households that tag is the only place the brand name is ever seen again.

Store-brand bedding adds another layer. A name that appears only in one chain’s stores may be owned by the retailer, licensed from another company or made for it by outside suppliers, and the label alone rarely says which.

Each guide in this group separates what independent sources record from what a company says about itself — who started the name, who owns it now, where its textiles are made and how its labels and packs have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A house brand named in Macy’s 2020s overhaul.

In the 2020s Macy’s set out to rework its private brands, and Charter Club was named in each stage. At the company’s investor day in February 2020, Retail Dive reported, Macy’s said a refurbishment of its private labels, especially in women’s apparel, was central to its “Polaris” turnaround plan, and singled out INC International Concepts, Alfani, Style & Co and Charter Club as brands being overhauled. Its chief merchandising officer, Patti Ongman, described the change being made as “just the DNA.”

In April 2023 Home Textiles Today reported that Macy’s chairman and chief executive, Jeff Gennette, had told an investor conference that “every brand in home, accessories and ready-to-wear is going to have a complete revamp over the next 2½ years,” with the refreshed brands due to begin rolling out that August. The brands, many of them dating from the Federated era according to the trade paper, were being reworked for shoppers aged roughly 30 to 50. In February 2024 Modern Retail reported that Macy’s had already relaunched I.N.C. and Bar III and that Style & Co and Charter Club were to make their re-debut shortly; it quoted Emily Erusha-Hilleque, Macy’s senior vice president of private brands, describing “a lot of positive green shoots in the brands that we’ve touched so far.”

The brand’s page on Macy’s website, as archived by the Wayback Machine in January 2026, was titled “Charter Club Clothing & Home.” It listed women’s cashmere sweaters, coats and pajama sets alongside cotton sheet sets, duvet cover sets, down comforters, pillows and quilt sets, with product names tagged “Exclusively at Macy’s,” “Macy’s Exclusive” or “Created for Macy’s” — the wording that tells shoppers the name belongs to one store.

For a design guide, Charter Club shows how a store brand carries its identity through labels, hang tags and packs rather than through a founder or a factory. Compare Macy’s, the store that owns the name, and Martex, another American towel and sheet name. For this guide we use navy, linen and oatmeal with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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