TEXTILE TITANS
IN THE RICH HERITAGE OF AMERICAN FABRIC MILLS, THESE MEN STAND OUT AS INDUSTRY GIANTS.
Byline: Scott Malone
Roger Milliken
The company founded in 1865 by Seth Milliken has built a reputation as one of the industry’s most closely held. While its believed to have revenues of around $4 billion, which would make it by far the largest textile company in the U.S., the family-owned mill, based in Spartanburg, S.C., is secre tive about its profits and corporate strategy.
On the ohter hand, Seth’s grandson — chairman and chief executive officer Roger Milliken — has never been shy about his political views. The 85-year-old textile magnate has been a fierce advocate of protecting the domestic textile industry, providing financing for lobbying battles against free-trade agreements.
He backed H. Ross Perot’s unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1992 and has been a loud voice against China’s impending admission to the World Trade Organization. In 1999, he told WWD he was “outraged, totally outraged,” at the U.S.’s decision to award Normal Trade Relations status to China.
J. Spencer Love
At the age of 27, former World War I doughboy J. Spencer Love built a textile plant and opened Burlington Mills weaving basic cotton fabrics. Love, eager for growth, soon decided to specialize in the new “artificial silk” — rayon — and the company’s synthetic bedspread began unfolding.
The company opened its second plant in 1926 and established a New York sales office in 1929, just before the start of the Great Depression. Love used the economic downturn to his advantage, buying idle mills from local families and re-opening them. By late 1936, the company had 22 plants and $25 million in revenues. A year later, the company went public.
During World War War II, the company began making fabrics for the armed forces, including parachute cloth made from another new synthetic fiber — nylon. Love died in 1962, the year the mill he founded became the first U.S. textile company to hit the $1 billion revenue mark.
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Aaron Feuerstein
In November 1995, Aaron Feuerstein was riding high. His company, Malden Mills Industries, was approaching its 90th anniversary, and in a WWD interview, Feuerstein sketched out a bold growth plan that called for the fleece mill to hit $1 billion in revenues by 2003.
Two weeks later, a tragedy catapulted Feuerstein and his company onto the national stage. An explosion at the company’s Lawrence, Mass., plant ignited a blaze that destroyed three of the company’s 10 buildings and left many of its 2,400 workers facing a jobless Christmas.
Feuerstein, the grandson of company founder Henry Feuerstein, said he would not only rebuild the plant where it was, rather than moving it to an area with cheaper labor, but that he would continue to pay his workers for the three months it would take to restore the facility.
Leon Lowenstein
Leon Lowenstein was one of the industry’s enduring characters, marking a 70-year career in what became one of its most powerful companies.
Lowenstein joined his father, Abram Lincoln, in business in 1898, taking the helm in 1936. He was known as LL by close associates, and gained a reputation as a tough-talking trader who drove a hard bargain in buying and selling fabrics.
In its heyday, the company was the single largest buyer of gray goods in the nation — about 500 million yards a year — not counting goods produced in-house. Lowenstein served as honorary chairman until he died in 1976 at 92.
Edgar Woolard
When Edgar Woolard Jr. relinquished his post as chairman of DuPont in 1997 at the age of 63, it marked the end of a 40-year career at the Wilmington, Del.-based chemical and fiber giant.
Woolard got his start as an industrial engineer at the company’s Kinston, N.C., Dacron polyester plant and by 1989 had risen to ceo. However, the industry was changing, and in a 1995 speech at the annual meeting of the American Textile Manufacturers Institute, he said the textile industry was “in a global war.”
“If you’re not positive you’ll win in this global war, there is a good chance you’re losing it,” he said. “Globalization of the textile industry is a fact of life.”
Hugh William Close
Not many executives can thank a Japanese bomber for their careers. Hugh William Close is an exception. In 1945, Close was in New York while the Navy aircraft carrier to which he was assigned was undergoing repairs after being attacked by Japanese aircraft. While on leave, Close went on a blind date with Anne Springs, daughter of Col. Elliott White Springs, owner of Springs Mills.
After Close proposed to Anne, her father convinced the young seaman to join his growing textile company, which he did in 1946.
Close rose through the organization and when Col. Springs died in 1959, succeeded him as president. He aggressively expanded the company and took it public.
Close became chairman in 1969 and remained active until his death in 1983 at age 63.
Chuck Hayes
When Chuck Hayes was only 16, he decided to leave high school and his job at his family’s Gloversville, N.Y., dairy farm to start work at a local knitting mill. That was in 1950. Just 12 years later, Hayes was named president of Guilford Mills. after just a year with that company. In another five years, he was named chairman, a post he retains today.
Hayes was one of the first top executives in the U.S. textile industry to realize that Mexico was destined to play an important role in the apparel trade. By the mid-Nineties, Hayes stepped forward to encourage other textile mills to get involved in Mexico as NAFTA became a reality.