Pattern for Success

In a Los Angeles department store, a salesgirl took from her purse a paper bearing the letters V, M, B and S. Beside each, she scribbled numbers, then mailed the sheet to Manhattan's Simplicity Pattern Co. She was reporting on dress-pattern sales in her department -- strictly as a favor to the flattering Simplicity salesman who had presented her with a smile and a shiny silver compact. In 100 key U.S. stores, other girls did Simplicity a like favor.

Last week in Manhattan, Simplicity's President Joseph Michael Shapiro, 58, who is cut to a short, chunky pattern, added up the reports with a pleased smile. They told him that the pattern business was booming as never before. At the present rate he believes thrifty women will buy 15% more patterns this year than the record-breaking 120 million sold in 1946. More important to Shapiro -- who knew that V, M and B meant Simplicity's potent competitors, Vogue, McCall and Butterick -- it proved that S was more than holding its own as the biggest U.S. pattern producer. Now selling 40% more patterns than last year, Simplicity claimed that it could count on supplying more than half of all patterns sold in the U.S. this year.

For this pattern of success, President "Pop" Shapiro had a seven-word formula neatly printed on a small sign on his oak-stained desk: "Fools invent fashions--wise men follow them."

Cut-Rate Idea. Pop Shapiro had had no intention of following it when he brought his immigrant family from Russia to Toledo, in 1914. He worked as a laborer and mechanic until he got a job as an advertising salesman on a small fashion trade magazine.

One day in 1927 Pop spotted the $1 price on a dress pattern which came into the office.

"Why should an envelope and a piece of tissue paper cost a dollar" he asked. "They shouldn't cost more than 10-c-." So he decided to make them for 15-c-. He rented a small loft, and went to work with his son cutting out patterns. They cribbed their designs from department-store windows, movies, and dress companies, priced their patterns at 15-c- (and later 25-c-), while most others sold between 50-c- and $2. They eschewed high-fashion designs, kept their patterns easy to make. Most important, they printed cutting lines and instructions (in English and Spanish) on each piece of the paper pattern, in contrast to the traditional method of identifying pattern sections only by punched holes.

To textile manufacturers Shapiro said: "If you'll help me sell my 15-c- patterns they'll help you sell goods." So textile salesmen plugged Simplicity patterns. Sales were moderately brisk when the 1929 crash came. To Simplicity, that was a stroke of luck. Women who had never made a dress in their lives were forced to learn--and Simplicity's cheap, easy-to-make patterns were soon outselling all other brands.

Reconverted Suits. Simplicity wooed home-economics teachers with a slick, illustrated free magazine featuring Simplicity dresses. Its designers, under James J. Shapiro, 38, Pop's son and Simplicity's vice president, scanned the market like infantry scouts. Popular styles were copied, with minor variations, and marketed in sizes ranging from "infant" to a robust 48. Slow-movers were quickly dropped. (Simplicity junks about 25% of all patterns each month.) During the war, James's wife, who helps with company promotion, snipped up one of his old suits to demonstrate how easily it could be remodeled into a woman's suit. Result: Simplicity's popular "remake" patterns raised hob with male wardrobes throughout the U.S. and Canada.

Last year, after branching out into patterns ranging from crib spreads to clerical cassocks, sales were $6,681,153; net profit, $563,343.

Unlike other businessmen, Pop Shapiro worries little about the future. As he put it: "In a boom, when retail dress prices are high, homemade dresses are an easy way to stretch the family budget. In a recession, they're an absolute must."

Many a budgeting housewife knew just what he meant.

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