Results of Prudent Aggression

O young Lochinvar is come out of the West;

Thru all the wide border his clothes were the best,

But unlike his namesake made famous by Scott,

A stealer of brides our hero is not.

Quite the happiest gallant e'er you did see,

For next to his skin he has B.V.D.

Dreaming up doggerel for a 1912 house organ called the B.V.D.ealer, an anonymous poet unwittingly set up one of the catchiest slogans in U.S. advertising: "Next to Myself I Like B.V.D. Best." The slogan, along with sturdy lines of men's underwear and saucy injunctions such as "Now, Now Cool Off--Get Your B.V.D.s On!", made B.V.D.* an American byword and a titan of the trade. But by World War II, overextension, inefficient mills and changed buying habits had shrunk the onetime giant. Now, under different ownership, B.V.D. is headed up again. Since 1957 its plants have quadrupled to 16, and its sales have risen 52% to last year's $17.7 million. Bolstered by some recent corporate acquisitions, sales this year are running double the 1961 rate. Earnings are up by 25%.

Losing Their Shirts. Behind this recovery is an enthusiastic underwear salesman with a policy of "prudent aggression." He is balding Sol Kittay, 52, a British immigrant who rose from a $12-a-week office-boy's job to become a successful salesman casting around for a firm of his own. In 1945, with savings and a borrowed $100,000, he bought a rundown Ohio textile mill, put it back in the black, started expanding. Within six years, he was big enough to buy B.V.D.

Apart from its familiar name, the firm offered little. Sales of union suits had faded with the rise of central heating, and Clark Gable singlehanded ruined the undershirt by wearing none in a memorable motel scene with Claudette Colbert in 1934's Oscar-winning It Happened One Night. The King's male subjects ripped off their own undershirts; sales plunged 40%. B.V.D. gamely tried to stretch into sports shirts, sweatshirts and socks, gradually boggled in a complexity of products and styles that became more complicated to order and stock than to sell.

Wooing the Women. Sol Kittay changed all that. He cut production to four lines of shorts and undershirts, including T shirts, whose postwar popularity among men has overcome the losses of the Gable days. Everything else he assigned to licensees. He even found a buyer for waste lint. ("Now who would think," he asks, "that you could sell lint?") To simplify ordering and to expand sales, Kittay used the supermarket device of packaging his products in sets of three, put them out on big, bright store racks to catch the eyes of women shoppers, who buy 85% of men's underwear.

With money from its first public stock issue last February, B.V.D. has acquired four firms. First was Beau Brummel Ties, Inc., which has sales of $4,000,000 and is the only moneymaker Kittay ever bought. Next came Mullins Mills and County Mills, which together sell $20 million in knitted outerwear. Two months ago, Kittay moved into women's undergarments, bought Flexees International, which makes girdles, bras and swim suits. Using prudent aggression, Kittay hopes eventually to lift B.V.D. to first place from its present fourth place in men's underwear, behind Fruit of the Loom, Cooper's and Hanes. For next to nothing else, Sol Kittay likes B.V.D. best.

*For Bradley, Voorhees and Day, who founded the firm in 1876.

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