BOSTON (AP) – At 6-foot-4 and 230 pounds, Bradford Brandon is tall, but he’s not fat. So the longtime customer of Casual Male Big & Tall welcomes the large-size clothing chain’s switch to a new name without heavy baggage.

The new moniker, Casual Male XL, drops the word “big,” which many customers equate as a code word for “fat” in the euphemism-rich world of retail branding.

“I don’t understand ‘big,’ but when they say ‘tall,’ I know what that means because I’m tall,” Brandon, a 41-year-old Boston resident, said Wednesday while searching for 38-inch inseam pants at a downtown Boston store that recently switched to the new name. “I’m big and I’m tall, but I’m not fat.”

Despite Casual Male XL’s re-branding, “big & tall” hasn’t yet fallen out of favor with smaller rivals in the $6-billion-a-year big-size men’s clothing industry. Chains such as Men’s Wearhouse and J.C. Penney continue promoting their extensive large-size men’s clothing lines as “big & tall,” and catalog clothing seller KingSize isn’t afraid of referencing size in its name.

But analysts say the re-branding by the largest specialty big-size men’s retailer indicates the industry is finally catching up with large women’s clothing, where the terms “plus-size” and “queen-size” are becoming as hard to find as the now-outdated “husky” size for heavy men.

Casual Male XL’s move is an attempt to draw in tall customers like Brandon who dislike the “big & tall” label’s “fat” connotation, as well as customers of average height and modestly large girth who don’t think of themselves as fat.

“The men’s market has finally picked up on the fact that not every guy wants to be told he’s big and tall,” said Marshal Cohen of the market research firm NPD Group Inc. “A lot of guys want to be told, ‘I’m just a little bit bigger than average.”‘

Cohen said the name change could help Casual Male XL expand beyond its traditional customer with a waist size averaging around 48 inches to more modestly sized men with 40- to 42-inch waists who find “end-of-the-rack” size selections at department stores lacking.

David Levin, the company’s president and CEO, said those customers represent a bigger market than those with 48- to 50-inch waists. But the company’s research found many modestly sized men were reluctant to visit stores carrying the old Casual Male Big & Tall name because they didn’t think of themselves as fat, and figured a ‘big & tall’ store would carry only “XXL” sizes.

“Here’s a guy who doesn’t want to come in the store with his preconceived notion that they don’t even have my size,” Levin said in a phone interview.

Donna Hazard, a 52-year-old Narragansett, R.I., woman who was shopping at Casual Male XL for a son who stands 6-foot-8, agrees with the company’s reasoning.

“I do think it sounds nicer,” she said. “There are no negative associations with XL, really.”

In the women’s industry, store names steer clear of references to “big” – take Lane Bryant, Avenue, Catherines and Jessica London, for example – and sellers generally limit size references only to the extent needed to get the message across that their offerings aren’t for the petite.

“The ‘big and tall’ label is definitely a stigma,” said Thomas Filandro, a retail analyst with Susquehanna Financial Group. “When it comes to consumer habits, men are always the slowest to pick up a trend.”

Casual Male Retail Group, the Canton, Mass.-based retail chain’s parent company, announced Wednesday that it has finished a monthslong re-branding campaign that has removed “Big & Tall” from the chain’s 483 stores in 44 states. The campaign also spruced up the 20-year-old chain’s logo, abandoning a yellow-and-black theme in favor of a navy blue-and-orange look intended to evoke a chic designer image.

Levin, who took over at Casual Male after its 2002 emergence from bankruptcy, said the company has enjoyed rising sales since it began testing the new name on a trial basis at a handful of stores last fall. Second-quarter sales at stores open at least a year were up nearly 11 percent from a year ago at Casual Male, which reported $421 million in sales in its most recent fiscal year.

“We’ve got a lot of new customers who used to see our old signs and never considered walking in the store,” Levin said.

Some customers who did go in were nevertheless uncomfortable with the name, said Michael Galante, manager of the Casual Male XL store at Boston’s Downtown Crossing.

“We actually had people say, ‘Do you have a paper bag I can use?’,” Galante said. “They didn’t feel comfortable having to walk down the street with a plastic bag with that big yellow logo and the words ‘big and tall.”‘

The re-branding campaign, which has been accompanied by television ads, grew out of surveys the company conducted with thousands of customers. Many reported the term “XL” made them feel “more like an athlete.”

“When we showed the focus groups the word ‘XL,’ they embraced that word,” Levin said. “They said, ‘I like that. I’m an XL guy. That’s a powerful guy.”‘

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On the Net:

Casual Male XL: http://www.casualmalexl.com

AP-ES-08-10-06 1319EDT

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