Up in the Loft

When values go up, up, up, And prices go down, down, down, Robert Hall this season Will show you the reason: Low overhead, Low overhead.

Behind this singing commercial perpetrated by Robert Hall Clothes, Inc., lies the solid substance of a merchandising phenomenon which has made other U.S. retailers green-eyed with envy. In eight years, Robert Hall Clothes, Inc. has mushroomed from a single store in an old loft in Waterbury, Conn, to a chain of 75. The stores have no fancy fronts or Hollywood interiors. But they do have men's suits & coats from $19.95 to $38.95 and women's dresses from $2.95 to $10.95. Their low overhead is a fact: they are in the cheapest possible quarters. By slashing markup to the bone, clothing is sold the way supermarkets sell groceries. Customers simply grab what they want from pipe-racks, pay cash and carry their purchases away.

Last week, while other clothing stores were pulling in their horns, Robert Hall thought it was just the time to expand some more. It was building seven more stores in six cities, stretching the chain from Manhattan to the Pacific Coast.

Under the Hat. Robert Hall's sales, competitors guess, may now be crowding $75 million a year. But no one really knows because the sales and net are included in the overall figures of United Merchants & Manufacturers Inc., the huge, sprawling textile empire which owns the Robert Hall chain.

All Robert Hall figures are carefully kept under the hat of U.M. & M.'s President Jacob Schwab, a shy, cold-eyed man with a passion for obscurity. His name usually gets into public print only once a year, when the U.S. Treasury lists him as one of the highest-paid executives in the , U.S. The latest list put his salary & bonus in 1946 at $440,542, third in the payments so far reported.*

Like his staff, Schwab puts in an 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. day, five days a week, sometimes takes work home to his apartment on Fifth Avenue or his country home in Westchester County. He smokes and drinks only occasionally, has no hobbies ("I play a little golf but not very well"), and seldom goes out evenings. He has a simple method for keeping his razor-sharp mind honed: "I just like to work."

In the cutthroat textile business, Manhattan-born Jake Schwab fought his way up from scratch. He left high school at 16 to work at odd jobs. At 20, he got a $15-a-week stock clerk's job with Cohn-Hall--*Marx, a big textile converter. Young Jake had a knack for figures, studied nights to improve it. By 1928 he had risen to treasurer. In that year, Bankers Kidder, Peabody & Co. raised about $20 million to make Cohn-Hall-Marx the base of a textile pyramid integrating many different businesses in the cotton-rayon industry. The new giant was United Merchants & Manufacturers Inc. and Jake Schwab went in as treasurer. He stepped into the president's shoes in 1939.

Big Deeds. When the war gave U.M. & M. its big chance to expand, shrewd Jake Schwab was ready. At war's end, he kept right on expanding. Now his empire includes 33 companies, stretches from the U.S. (twelve weaving and finishing plants) and Canada (one plant) to South America, where U.M. & M. now has three plants.

When the buyers' market came, Schwab was not caught napping. Since Robert Hall Clothes buys most of its fabrics from other mills and hires other manufacturers to make most of its clothes, it could pick up goods cheaply and make bargain deals with suitmakers. Thus it could balance off the slump in its own textile operations and go after the newly price-conscious U.S. consumer. Said Jake Schwab: "We're the A. & P. of the clothing business, and that's what the business needs most right now."

*First two: Cinemogul Charles P. Skouras, $985,300; Cinemactor Humphrey Bogart, $467,351. *No kin to Robert Hall, a name plucked from the air.

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