A Rackful of Giants

Most of Manhattan is edging into summer this week, but along Seventh Avenue it is already autumn. Buyers from all over the U.S. are making their seasonal march into garment-district showrooms to rummage through, inspect and buy fall fashions. In a $13 billion industry that survives and thrives on change, the biggest change of all is in the corporate shape of the industry itself. Women's wear, a business of some 4,700 firms in which the mean has always been two or three partners with a $25,000 bankroll, is busy styling a whole new rackful of corporate giants.

No apparel giant yet comes near the giants in other industries, but two, Jonathan Logan and Bobbie Brooks, are jostling to crack $100 million in annual sales for the first time. Led by sharp, hard-driving David Schwartz, Logan last year reached $81 million; Maurice Saltzman's Bobbie Brooks was close behind at $75.5 million. Ranged well below them but growing fast is a $20 million to $30 million tier that includes Majestic Specialties, Russ Togs and White Stag, and a third echelon that is working upward from the $10 million plateau.

Reduced Panic. Many of the new giants have also gone public, and the two largest are on the Big Board. They have replaced part-time accountants with cost-conscious controllers, lean to computers and automated distribution warehouses in place of production charts and pushcarts. On a shopping spree of their own, they are buying up smaller companies, expanding into Europe, financing on Wall Street. After hearing their business for years compared to a crap game, they are finding themselves lionized by analysts because of their sustained earnings and growth. "After 40 years in the business," admits Majestic Specialties' President Erwin Klineman, "I may even take a management course this summer."

The giants have a common background. All have fed on the recent trend to women's casual clothes and the emerging purchasing power of the 15-to 24-year-olds, who represent 13% of the U.S. female population but, along with others who can wear their sizes, make 35% of its clothes purchases. Making a hit with the junior sizes, the big companies amassed enough capital to plan beyond a season at a time. They learned better merchandising, pushed brand names with national advertising, mailers and store displays. Increasing capital and slower style changes have allowed them to concentrate on quality control and have reduced the eternal Seventh Avenue panic over a thousand dozen garments turned out with mis-tailored sleeves or weepy dyes.

Latest Shift. Like any smart firm, the giants still copy competitors' hot items, but they get samples of them from their staff of comparison shoppers instead of rushing a partner up the street to Macy's third floor. The big companies are forcing the whole industry in their direction. They have already moved into double-knit garments and to new laminated materials; the latest shift is to the new stretch fabrics that started with ski pants, expanded into brassieres and girdles, and will eventually pop up in almost everything women wear. "It used to be," says Russ Togs President Eli Rousso, "that a salesman's personality was what counted most in selling. But no more. Nowadays, this is an industry of facts and figures."

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