Marty Spiro, June 23, 2016

Marty Spiro, June 23, 2016

Marty Spiro talks about being a manufacturer in women’s popular priced sportswear. After about twenty years in business, Marty serendipitously developed a close business relationship with Candy Seward, top buyer at Thalhimers Department Store, based in Richmond, VA. Candy had a national reputation for being the number one buyer in the country. So when Candy endorsed Marty and his product line, buyers from other department stores listened. Marty’s business grew tremendously.

Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives

Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives

2016-06-23

Copyright remains with interview subject and their heirs.

video

LVTNT-34

Susan Clemens-Bruder

Marty Spiro

00:46:51

5.4 June 23, 2016 Marty Spiro, June 23, 2016 LVTNT-34 00:46:51 LVTNT Lehigh Valley Textile and Needlework Trades Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Marty Spiro Susan Clemens-Bruder Gail Eisenberg video/mp4 SpiroMarty_20160623.mp4 1.0:|11(2)|30(2)|45(8)|64(12)|81(2)|96(9)|115(5)|134(2)|153(6)|172(2)|191(13)|212(8)|231(3)|252(5)|269(13)|286(7)|303(10)|322(10)|341(7)|360(5)|377(14)|398(11)|419(8)|438(17)|453(12)|470(14)|489(4)|506(6)|521(13)|540(3)|557(11)|576(8)|591(8)|612(5)|627(14)|642(8)|665(6)|690(15)|725(13)|746(12)|765(9)|804(2)|825(5)|848(8)|881(9)|896(5)|911(6) 0 https://youtu.be/bWPHZ8lGbjQ YouTube video 0 Introduction—Marty Spiro's Family History SC: Today is June 23, 2016. An interview with Marty Spiro. Could you tell me your full name, and when you were born and where you were born first.&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: Martin Fred Spiro. Born in Brooklyn, New York, 1933.&#13 ; &#13 ; SC: And could you talk about your early life as far back as you know, and in doing so then perhaps start with your parents, grandparents, as many as you know, where they were from, when they came to this country, and then anything that you know about them: their education, what they did in life.&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: Okay. Well, in 1905, my paternal grandfather came to New York, couldn't speak English. Came from Lodz, Poland, and became a peddler. and I asked him years later, I said, ‘Grandpa, you couldn’t speak English. How could you be a peddler and sell clothing?’ And he smiled and said ‘I went to the new Italian district in New York where they couldn’t speak English, and they thought I was the American.’ So in a few years he started a business, a knitting mill business, with his two brothers-in-law and became very successful. My maternal grandfather came from Munkacs, Hungary, about the same time, as a kid, he was 10 years old and was going to visit his uncle for the summer in New York, decided he never wanted to go back. 0 285 The 60s: Early Business Ventures MS: And after college, I worked at Otis Elevator for years and decided it wasn't for me ; I was an industrial engineer but I saw that in a large corporation, I didn't have the personality or the social skills to advance in the huge corporation like that. So around 1960, the opportunity came in Allentown with my brother-in-law, and I started a T-shirt factory, a small T-shirt factory. My brother-in-law is Dave Sussman. And we started about 1960 and struggled because we really didn’t know too much about the business. Everything we made we lost in mistakes. But about two years later, we started making money and became very profitable, and we did very well. And about 17 years later, we decided to split. My brother-in-law wanted to go into more styled goods - higher risk, higher profit. I was more conservative. I was content to be in the basic, simple, sportswear business where it never went out of style, and you didn’t have as much risk, didn’t have as much profit - that’s fine with me. So we each went our separate ways, and then I bought one of our contractor’s factories, called Hy Litwak, so I bought his factory, and it turned out, we found out early, Dave and I, he was very good on the outside. He was good at selling ; I was worse than terrible at selling, awful. I was very good at running the factory, where that was his shortcoming. So it was a good partnership: he was on the outside, and I was on the inside. 0 456 A Lucky Break—Meeting and Forging a Friendship with Department Store Buyer, Candy Seward MS: And about a year later, after I went on my own, I got a call out of the blue. And this is relevant to the book The Outliers by...&#13 ; &#13 ; SC: Malcolm Gladwell.&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: That’s right, Malcolm Gladwell, where his thesis is that people who really have made it, all have gotten help of one kind or another, either from people, or from situations, or from just luck. Well I had luck. A year after I went on my own, I got a phone call. The lady said that ‘my name is Candy Seward. I’m the buyer for Tallhimers. I've been trying to find out where your new place was.’ So I said, I know who you are. I’ve seen your name on orders for many years. She said ‘I’d like to see you in New York next week. I'll be in New York for Market Week, and I have an office at the AMC building,’ the Associated Merchandise Corporation. They were New York buyers for major department stores around the country. The largest being Federated Department Stores. So she said ‘my office is on the 11th floor, and I'd like to see you at whatever time.’ And I said sure. So I went in and met her, and she showed me what she wanted and writes out an order for about 400 dozen, a very large order. And I said ‘do you want a sample before I make it?’ She said ‘no, just ship me the same thing you’ve been shipping for years, it’ll be fine.’ So I did, and I had no illusions that I had sold her, that I became a salesman. She bought from me, but I didn't sell to her. So I never went after the other Federated on the 7th ave, seventh floor or any of the other department stores. Because I still felt after 17 years, you know, I’m not going to fool myself, I don’t know how to sell, so I never went after anybody else. 0 1054 Selling to Donna Mateer SC: Okay, would you go back and talk about your anecdote about Philadelphia?&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: In Philadelphia, Mike Miller, my Pennsylvania salesman, said ‘I’m going next week to see Donna Matier at Strawbridge and Clothier there. She's a very good buyer, she's never bought from me. I go every year, she's very polite, looks at the line and gives me time and never buys, but I never give up. So she never buys, I never give up, so someday I'll get it when she needs me.’ So I said ‘okay Mike. So if she turned you down again, go through this ritual: ask her if she's going next week to the Omni Hotel in Florida for the import show, and she will say yes because all the AMC buyers are going to Florida, and after she says yes, say do you know Candy? You don't need a last name. It's like Madonna or Cher, you know no last name needed, do you know Candy? And she will say yes. Then the third thing is, ask Candy about our company.’ And he came back, and I said what happened? She didn't buy, and I said, did you go through the questions? He said ‘yes’ I did. And I said why don’t we see what happens. Two weeks later I get a call: ‘My name is Donna Mateer, I’m the buyer from Strawbridge and Clothier. I'll be in New York at the AMC building. I forgot what floor she was on and I’d like to see you.’ So I go, and she gives me a large order, and then I went back, I show it to Mike, and I said it is your account, you get the commissions, but she said she'd rather deal with the owner of the factory than the salesman. So he said great. So as long as I stayed in business, she became a very large customer and got to know her and her husband. 0 1214 "Marty the Knockoff Man" MS: And then a few years later, I had what some people would call an epiphany. I was in New York, Candy wanted me to make some new styles for her. So I made it, I made a sample, I brought it in, and I'm showing it to her, and I said this garment that was knitted was on a thirty-six gauge interlock machine with thirty singles comb cotton. And she said, look, I know what you're saying, don't tell anybody else that. I said ‘why not? Aren’t they interested in what they’re buying?’ She said ‘no,’ she said ‘I’ll tell you what they’re interested in. They're interested in good reviews from the merchandise manager every six months, promotions, bonuses, and raises. They don't care what machine made this garment.’ I said ‘oh my God, this is, why didn’t I know this 20 years ago, I could have been a salesman.’ So she said ‘your job is not selling garments, your job is to make the buyer look like a star in her department store. If you do that, the business will come. You make her look good where she can get good reviews, promotions, raises, and bonuses and you'll do well.’ 0 1606 From Sportswear to Banking—Becoming the Director of the American Bank MS: It lasted for a long time, and 1982 I discovered I had a gift for analyzing bank stocks, financial statements. And I started investing in that. And without this one lady, leveraging Candy, I could analyze all I wanted, I wouldn’t have any money to buy. So I was able to buy bank stocks, and in the five years, I was doing better investing than I was in the factory, so I sold my factory in 1987, and got out of that business. And then went into bank investing and went on the boards of a couple of banks. Then about nineteen or twenty years ago, Mark Jaindl, who was doing the same thing as I, as well as being in the turkey business, he was investing in bank stocks-- Mort Levy had introduced us a few years ago. We hit it off. He would analyze a financial statement, I would make notes, and then we’d compare, and we worked together very well for five years. Then Mark left the family business. He went to work as an investment banker in New Jersey for a large firm and they bought other companies. And one of the companies they bought was a company in Texas that had a contract with the federal government to rationalize all these threats that they closed down and that meltdown when the thrifts were borrowing short and lending long and the interest rates rose, and they were losing money and some of them were seized by the government. 0 1807 Family History (cont'd) SC: Could we go back beginning to tell names of your parents, grandparents, etc. If you know actually when they came, you did say that, where they came from, if you didn't say it.&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: Yeah, I told you that my paternal grandfather came from Lodz, Poland. My maternal grandfather came from Munkacs, Hungary.&#13 ; &#13 ; SC: What were their names?&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: My maternal grandfather was Max Weinberger, and my grandfather, my father's father, was Harry Spiro, and went by his Yiddish name, Yicheel, so my father and my Uncle Manny used to call him ‘Cheel.’&#13 ; &#13 ; SC: Do you know their wives’ names?&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: Yes.&#13 ; &#13 ; SC: Their maiden names?&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: My grandmother's, my mother's mother's maiden name was Goodfriend, and my father's, my grandmother, my father's mother was the Throap or Trop. 0 2212 Jack Spiro's Knitting Mill in Lowell, MA GE: So now this is actually about your, really more about your dad, I had a couple of questions. I thought that was really interesting that you mentioned that there were incentives that you went to Lowell, your family and do you know anything about the incentives-- was that from, who that was . . . how that was structured . . . how that worked that your dad set this knitting mill up in Lowell, Massachusetts because that's obviously the big textile area before Brooklyn. &#13 ; &#13 ; MS: There might have been tax incentives in Massachusetts for them to come up. I'm sure there must have been tax incentives. And I think the state paid to move the factory up there.&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: Okay, okay, and so your family was there it sounded like for about 15 years?&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: 1936 to 1950.&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: Okay, so about 14 years, and then you said they came here and they opened a knitting mill, is that correct? T-shirt?&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: Well they opened...my uncle opened a knitting mill as part of his business...&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: Right, right.&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: ...and my father worked for him.&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: Okay, so it was a knitting mill, not a T-shirt company.&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: No, it was part of the T-shirt company. 0 2321 1960: Starting the Business with Closeout Cloth GE: And what you and your brother-in-law started was that similar to that T-shirt business?&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: No, no. What we did, we bought closeout cloth. Somebody made a mistake. The shade of blue was a slight different from what the buyer wanted, they wouldn’t take it, so we went to dealers who bought that, and there was a big one in Allentown, S. Levine and Sons. We did business with Levines and New York fabric companies that bought closeout cloth, so we had a big break on the cloth. The labor we had to pay the same as anybody else, but a big [cost] break was the cloth. And on the main floor, budget sportswear if the shade of blue was a little bit off, it didn’t matter. Blue was blue. So we just make sure that if there were 30 stores, one shade of blue would go to one store and another, so you wouldn’t have twenty different shades of blue in the same rack- - it looks awful. So that was our big edge on cloth. So when the lady brought me that skirt to make, it was like the cost was like 90% cloth was our big…&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: Competitive advantage.&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: ...advantage. And the sewing was practically nothing, so we had a tremendous profit item on that one. That was great. 0 2464 Business Timeline GE: Okay, and so just to get a little bit of a timetable then you were in business with your brother-in-law from 1960 to 1977.&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: Yes.&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: And then on your own from 1977 to 1987?&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: Yes.&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: And then at that point you sold your business, and I'm assuming that was early enough that your business was able to sell at a good price?&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: Yes. And I had no idea, but it wasn't too long after that, three years after that, that all that business moved to the Orient… 0 2511 Marty Spiro's Contractors GE: Right, so some of the contractors that you worked with, some of the sewing contractors that you were giving them business in the area, who were some of those names?&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: One was, let’s see, I know one was Reilly [?], but I know some went to Gerson Lazar, who needed some business, and then a fella named Mickey Stupak in Allentown. And there was a place in Egypt, Pennsylvania. I forgot the fella’s name, but we used him, and we used Hy Litwak before his factory and then Shirley Israelite had a factory, a contracting factory, we used her. And those are the ones that come to mind.&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: Right, okay, okay, good so you kept, you became their customer for a while.&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: Yes. 0 2686 Marty Spiro's Creative Inspirations and Values SC: So the last two questions, first of all, what has made you feel the most creative in your life? &#13 ; &#13 ; MS: Creative? Well I guess in the business you’re supposed to say I guess being financially successful, it gives you a sense of self-worth. It isn’t the money, it's just knowing that you’ve accomplished something with your life, been creative. If I had made less money, I would have had the same satisfaction. But knowing that I succeeded in what I did, that's what gives me some pleasure.&#13 ; &#13 ; SC: And the last one is what you value most in life?&#13 ; &#13 ; MS: I always say seeing that my children and my grandson have grown up to be wonderful people, and my daughter-in-law is a wonderful person. 0 MovingImage Marty Spiro talks about being a manufacturer in women’s popular priced sportswear. After about twenty years in business, Marty serendipitously developed a close business relationship with Candy Seward, top buyer at Thalhimers Department Store, based in Richmond, VA. Candy had a national reputation for being the number one buyer in the country. So when Candy endorsed Marty and his product line, buyers from other department stores listened. Marty’s business grew tremendously. Interview with Marty Spiro, June 23, 2016 SUSAN CLEMENS-BRUDER: Today is June 23, 2016. An interview with Marty Spiro. Could you tell me your full name, and when you were born and where you were born first. MARTY SPIRO: Martin Fred Spiro. Born in Brooklyn, New York, 1933. SC: And could you talk about your early life as far back as you know, and in doing so then perhaps start with your parents, grandparents, as many as you know, where they were from, when they came to this country, and then anything that you know about them: their education, what they did in life. MS: Okay. Well, in 1905, my paternal grandfather came to New York, couldn't speak English. Came from Lodz, Poland, and became a peddler. and I asked him years later, I said, 'Grandpa, you couldn't speak English. How could you be a peddler and sell clothing?' And he smiled and said 'I went to the new Italian district in New York where they couldn't speak English, and they thought I was the American.' So in a few years he started a business, a knitting mill business, with his two brothers-in-law and became very successful. My maternal grandfather came from Munkacs, Hungary, about the same time, as a kid, he was 10 years old and was going to visit his uncle for the summer in New York, decided he never wanted to go back. So he stayed here, and my mother was born here. My father was born in Lodz. A year after my grandfather came here, my grandfather had enough money to send for my grandmother and my father, so they came over, and they had three more children born in this country. And the knitting mill was very successful. In 1936, they were given a lot of incentives to move to Massachusetts. So when I was three years old, we moved to Lowell, Massachusetts. And in New York, the name was Spiro {saying the "I" as a long E sound}, and in Lowell, everybody said Spiro saying the "I" as a long I sound }. So my father said okay sounds okay, but I have relatives who were Spiro {long E}, my sons went back to Spiro {long E}, and I have relatives in France who were Spira, S-P-I-R-A. What happened was three brothers left Lodz around the same time in the early 1900s. One went to France, one went to Canada, and my grandfather went to New York. So I have relations in Canada and in France who I've met. And I grew up in Lowell, went to Lowell High School, and around the time I was 17, the knitting business failed, and my father, his end was running the factory so he could get jobs running factories, which he did. And then a year later, my uncle had a T-shirt factory in Allentown where they bought cloth, cut it, and sewed it. And when my father became available, they asked him to come down. They bought knitting machines, and my father ran the knitting mill. And about that time, I went off to college. And after college, I worked at Otis Elevator for years and decided it wasn't for me ; I was an industrial engineer but I saw that in a large corporation, I didn't have the personality or the social skills to advance in the huge corporation like that. So around 1960, the opportunity came in Allentown with my brother-in-law, and I started a T-shirt factory, a small T-shirt factory. My brother-in-law is Dave Sussman. And we started about 1960 and struggled because we really didn't know too much about the business. Everything we made we lost in mistakes. But about two years later, we started making money and became very profitable, and we did very well. And about 17 years later, we decided to split. My brother-in-law wanted to go into more styled goods - higher risk, higher profit. I was more conservative. I was content to be in the basic, simple, sportswear business where it never went out of style, and you didn't have as much risk, didn't have as much profit - that's fine with me. So we each went our separate ways, and then I bought one of our contractor's factories, called Hy Litwak, so I bought his factory, and it turned out, we found out early, Dave and I, he was very good on the outside. He was good at selling ; I was worse than terrible at selling, awful. I was very good at running the factory, where that was his shortcoming. So it was a good partnership: he was on the outside, and I was on the inside. It worked very well. And when we decided to split, he found somebody to run the factory and I hired salesmen. And it was going along very well. He was probably doing better than we did before. I was doing as well as I did before. I was happy. And then I had enough business to keep the factory going. And about a year later, after I went on my own, I got a call out of the blue. And this is relevant to the book The Outliers by... SC: Malcolm Gladwell. MS: That's right, Malcolm Gladwell, where his thesis is that people who really have made it, all have gotten help of one kind or another, either from people, or from situations, or from just luck. Well I had luck. A year after I went on my own, I got a phone call. The lady said that 'my name is Candy Seward. I'm the buyer for Tallhimers. I've been trying to find out where your new place was.' So I said, I know who you are. I've seen your name on orders for many years. She said 'I'd like to see you in New York next week. I'll be in New York for Market Week, and I have an office at the AMC building,' the Associated Merchandise Corporation. They were New York buyers for major department stores around the country. The largest being Federated Department Stores. So she said 'my office is on the 11th floor, and I'd like to see you at whatever time.' And I said sure. So I went in and met her, and she showed me what she wanted and writes out an order for about 400 dozen, a very large order. And I said 'do you want a sample before I make it?' She said 'no, just ship me the same thing you've been shipping for years, it'll be fine.' So I did, and I had no illusions that I had sold her, that I became a salesman. She bought from me, but I didn't sell to her. So I never went after the other Federated on the 7th ave, seventh floor or any of the other department stores. Because I still felt after 17 years, you know, I'm not going to fool myself, I don't know how to sell, so I never went after anybody else. So I shipped her the goods, went very well, she gave me reorders, she gave me orders for other styles, and I had to put on a night shift. And that was fine. And then we're going along like that, maybe another year later, two years later, my Pennsylvania salesman, a fella named Mike Miller, was in the factory, and he said 'next week I'm going to Pittsburgh and there's a show, a knit goods show in an armory, and I'm taking a booth. It's very interesting, there are hundreds of vendors there and you might find it interesting.' So I said all right, so I flew out in the morning, came back in the evening. And I talked to Mike in his booth, and I walked up and down the aisle looking at the different competitors. Some of them were competitors, and I was very pleased to see that most of my competitors were higher-priced than I was, so I wasn't worried about them. And then I saw one company that had a very extensive line, larger than mine with very very competitive prices. So I said, I congratulated the salesman on his line. I said this is a terrific line. I said I'm very impressed, and he said 'my company does something different from other companies. Instead of our designer' - they had a designer - 'instead of our designer coming up with a line, we fly out the best buyer in the country once a year, and together, the two of them develop a line.' I said 'well that's interesting - who is this buyer?' And he said 'well I don't know her last name, but she's from Virginia and her name is Candy.' And I said oh that's nice. So I thought oh my God, I'm doing business with the best buyer in the country, and I don't know it because I had nobody to compare her with. So she was my only customer. So the next time Candy called to meet her in New York on the 11th floor, I said - and by this time I got familiar with the building, and I knew that Federated had an office, one of their offices on the seventh floor was somebody who arranged hotel accommodations at some hotel in New York where they had a deal with large a supply of tenants. And the 12th floor was a cafeteria, where the buyers came in the morning, got to meet each other from around the country and go over things and go out into the market. So I said 'Candy, can we meet on the 12th floor in a cafeteria at 8 o'clock?' And she said sure. So I said 'you know why I am asking, don't you?' And she said yes, but it's alright. So 8 o'clock in the morning, the two of us met. We were the only ones in the cafeteria. We took a long table for ten people. We sat at the end, I took out some shirts, and one by one the buyers are coming in, and they see Candy and me at this table. They come over [and say] 'hi Candy, what are you doing?' 'I'm looking at Marty's fall line.' 'Oh, do you have room for me at the table?' And in twenty minutes the table was full. So they're all watching and they're asking questions ; 'oh I do very well with him.' So these are ladies, they happen to all be lady buyers, and all of them were getting calls from vendors around Broadway and that area. 'Please come into my showroom. I want you to see the new things.' 'Well I don't have time this trip ; I'll try to do it next trip.' These people are coming to me. 'Well I have some time at 3 o'clock ; I'm on the eighth floor, can you meet me?' So I'm booking appointments, and I'm booking appointments for the next day. So I call my wife. I say 'I'm staying over' because I have appointments for both days. So I sold everyone who was at the table. So now I had, it was too much for my plant day and night. I had to give out work to contractors, so I bought a Ford Econoline Truck, hired a driver, we cut the goods and we sent them out to the various contractors, so it became a very large business. And all from this one person. I felt 'well I'm selling them, but I'm leveraging her' her reputation. And I asked her years later cause we're still friends, and I stay over, they retired in the West Coast of Florida, and coming back on the auto train, I stay overnight with Candy and her husband, and we have dinner and then go to the auto train in Sanford the next morning. So I asked a few years ago why she shared cause she was very generous with the other buyers telling who she bought from, what she bought, what she paid. And she still came out with the best numbers of any buyer in the whole AMC clientele, always, no matter, she could tell everybody everything, and she still came out with the best sales figures. So she was like the goddess of retailing, so I said maybe three years ago, I said 'did any other vendor leverage your reputation as much as I did?' She said, 'no, nobody did.' And I think the reason for that was everybody else who sold was a good salesman. They didn't need help, or they felt they didn't need help. I knew I stunk at that, so I was looking for help, so I leveraged her reputation and did very well with that. And then one time Mike was in the factory saying 'next week I'm going to Philadelphia and then I'm going to see the buyer there, Donna Mateer, I've been calling on it for years-- SC: Okay, would you go back and talk about your anecdote about Philadelphia? MS: In Philadelphia, Mike Miller, my Pennsylvania salesman, said 'I'm going next week to see Donna Matier at Strawbridge and Clothier there. She's a very good buyer, she's never bought from me. I go every year, she's very polite, looks at the line and gives me time and never buys, but I never give up. So she never buys, I never give up, so someday I'll get it when she needs me.' So I said 'okay Mike. So if she turned you down again, go through this ritual: ask her if she's going next week to the Omni Hotel in Florida for the import show, and she will say yes because all the AMC buyers are going to Florida, and after she says yes, say do you know Candy? You don't need a last name. It's like Madonna or Cher, you know no last name needed, do you know Candy? And she will say yes. Then the third thing is, ask Candy about our company.' And he came back, and I said what happened? She didn't buy, and I said, did you go through the questions? He said 'yes' I did. And I said why don't we see what happens. Two weeks later I get a call: 'My name is Donna Mateer, I'm the buyer from Strawbridge and Clothier. I'll be in New York at the AMC building. I forgot what floor she was on and I'd like to see you.' So I go, and she gives me a large order, and then I went back, I show it to Mike, and I said it is your account, you get the commissions, but she said she'd rather deal with the owner of the factory than the salesman. So he said great. So as long as I stayed in business, she became a very large customer and got to know her and her husband. Very nice people and did a big business with Strawbridge and only because she asked Candy, and Candy said yes, you can do very well with him. And my business probably doubled and became quite successful. And then a few years later, I had what some people would call an epiphany. I was in New York, Candy wanted me to make some new styles for her. So I made it, I made a sample, I brought it in, and I'm showing it to her, and I said this garment that was knitted was on a thirty-six gauge interlock machine with thirty singles comb cotton. And she said, look, I know what you're saying, don't tell anybody else that. I said 'why not? Aren't they interested in what they're buying?' She said 'no,' she said 'I'll tell you what they're interested in. They're interested in good reviews from the merchandise manager every six months, promotions, bonuses, and raises. They don't care what machine made this garment.' I said 'oh my God, this is, why didn't I know this 20 years ago, I could have been a salesman.' So she said 'your job is not selling garments, your job is to make the buyer look like a star in her department store. If you do that, the business will come. You make her look good where she can get good reviews, promotions, raises, and bonuses and you'll do well.' I said, oh my, it's so simple, why didn't I, I never had thought of it. So I said, 'how do you suggest how to go about doing this?' She said 'well, for instance, quite often a vendor will short ship.' He doesn't have the right, he doesn't have all of the colors, so the buyer orders red, white, navy, pink, blue, maze, and the factory is short on maze and it's going to be two weeks late. Meanwhile the buyer puts an ad in the paper with the six colors and the merchandise manager sees there is only five colors on the racks. Where's the other color? Aw the damn vendor, he's going to be two weeks later on that. Well lady, you're supposed to be in a rapport with the vendors. You're supposed to know this before it happens. And she's thinking there goes my bonus, there goes my review. So Candy said 'the minute you know you're going to be late on something, you call the buyer and say 'look I don't have the yellow, I've got lilac, I've got fuchsia, I've got mint. You can substitute or just cancel the color because I don't have it.'' So they do accordingly and that way the buyer can go to the merchandise manager and say the vendor is going to be late on the yellow, I substituted lilac. Now the merchandise [manager] knows this buyer is on top of the business, you know, good reviews and the other things will follow. So the buyer is connected to me now. This guy is making me look good, I better stick with them. And so that worked out, I remember one time the Shillito buyer. The Shillito is big, was big, I'm not sure whether they still are in business in Cincinnati, Ohio. And the buyer there called up one day: 'I'm coming to New York next week, I'm going to bring you a crystal pleated skirt I'd like you to make.' I'd never made skirts. I said 'what's a crystal pleated skirt?' 'I'll bring one in and I'll show you.' So it was a polyester skirt, and it was sent out to a contractor with an oven or an oast that they folded these things up into an accordion type thing, and they put it in the oven and the synthetic melted a little bit and put the permanent pleat in the garment. So you had to cut it and put a hem in it cause it wouldn't pleat right, you couldn't put a hem in it after it was pleated, so we hemmed it and I found a contractor in New York, we shipped and came back, and it was a simple garment to make. And it was just white and navy. She said that's the only colors that would sell. So I started making that for her and showed it to the other buyers, and they started buying also. And then one of the buyers came to me, they came to me with velour. Nobody will know what that is anymore, but it was a fabric. It was very hot for a few years, and they put me into that business. So the buyers were coming to me. And then one time I was meeting with a bunch of buyers, some bought from me, some hadn't. And I bought a style that I concocted. I design something, so I'm showing it to them. The Shillito buyer starts laughing and she says 'baldheaded designer,' she said 'we do not need you to tell us what to buy ; you're Marty the knockoff man.' That's what they call me. 'What's selling good on the second floor in Branded Goods, we're on the Main floor in budget sportswear. What's hot on the branded good upstairs, we want you to make for less money on the main floor. That's what you do. So don't bring us any designs.' So the buyers who hadn't bought from me see that she's on such good terms with me that she can laugh at me and call me 'baldheaded designer.' So they started buying. I developed a tremendous business. It lasted for a long time, and 1982 I discovered I had a gift for analyzing bank stocks, financial statements. And I started investing in that. And without this one lady, leveraging Candy, I could analyze all I wanted, I wouldn't have any money to buy. So I was able to buy bank stocks, and in the five years, I was doing better investing than I was in the factory, so I sold my factory in 1987, and got out of that business. And then went into bank investing and went on the boards of a couple of banks. Then about nineteen or twenty years ago, Mark Jaindl, who was doing the same thing as I, as well as being in the turkey business, he was investing in bank stocks-- Mort Levy had introduced us a few years ago. We hit it off. He would analyze a financial statement, I would make notes, and then we'd compare, and we worked together very well for five years. Then Mark left the family business. He went to work as an investment banker in New Jersey for a large firm and they bought other companies. And one of the companies they bought was a company in Texas that had a contract with the federal government to rationalize all these threats that they closed down and that meltdown when the thrifts were borrowing short and lending long and the interest rates rose, and they were losing money and some of them were seized by the government. And there were lots of loans that the government didn't know what to do with, loans and foreclosed property, and they hired this firm in Texas to sell it for what they could. Sell these bad loans and the property, get the most out of it on the commission basis. So Mark got to see every kind of loan imaginable. It was a four and a half billion-dollar virtual bank. And then his father came to him a few years later to try to get him back, and Mark said 'to start a bank, I'll come back.' And Mark and Fred - Fred was a terrific guy, I miss him - and they asked me to go on the board of American Bank, where I'm still a director. And that's where I am today. SC: Could we go back beginning to tell names of your parents, grandparents, etc. If you know actually when they came, you did say that, where they came from, if you didn't say it. MS: Yeah, I told you that my paternal grandfather came from Lodz, Poland. My maternal grandfather came from Munkacs, Hungary. SC: What were their names? MS: My maternal grandfather was Max Weinberger, and my grandfather, my father's father, was Harry Spiro, and went by his Yiddish name, Yicheel, so my father and my Uncle Manny used to call him 'Cheel.' SC: Do you know their wives' names? MS: Yes. SC: Their maiden names? MS: My grandmother's, my mother's mother's maiden name was Goodfriend, and my father's, my grandmother, my father's mother was the Throap or Trop. I've seen it spelled both ways. But in this country, it was Throap. In Europe--and some moved to Israel-- it was T-R-O-P, so her name was Chaya Rivka, or Anna. Oh, no, no, no, Ida was her name ; Ida Spiro. It was Harry and Ida. And Chaya Rivka was her Hebrew name. And she could speak Polish for the rest of her life. She told me my father, who came here at 3, spoke Polish but lost it all and was fluent in Yiddish and English. And that my parents, like a lot of parents, they didn't want the children to speak Yiddish - you're in America now, speak English. So Yiddish was their secret language, so I never learned, my sister never learned. SC: Did they come from the same regions as their husbands? Do you know anything? MS: No. I don't know how my parents met. I think it was probably at one of these social clubs. I'm not sure. My father lived in Brooklyn, and my mother lived in East Side, New York. My father had graduated, my grandfather he, after he started making money, he moved to Brooklyn. SC: And so the social clubs, were they promoted in the Jewish community? MS: Yes. By then it was, by that time they were insulated. They kept to themselves. It's not that way anymore. Thank Goodness. SC: Do you know anything about their education, the people back from their parents? MS: My mother did not go to college. When she graduated high school she went to work for, I think, the phone company. And my grandfather went to, my father went to Brooklyn Polytech and he loved machinery and wasn't a good businessman, but wonderful with machinery. And [he] taught me how to wire up factories. I did the electrical work in our factories and a lot of the mechanical work. I learned how to fix machines. So I was good at that. But that was it for their education. SC: And back, in where they came from, do you know anything about those people, where they were, their education? MS: Well the, no, the ones in Hungary were destroyed in the Holocaust, and the ones who didn't get out in Lodz are gone. So my cousin in Paris, who is an eye surgeon, his father, Jacques, what his name was Poland but it became Jacques in France-- he wrote a page for each of the seven relatives who were killed in Poland in the Holocaust, so there is a page for each of them in the Yad Vashem, which my cousin Kathy from Canada, who is the family researcher, she can find anything, including the manifests of the ship that brought my grandfather into the country. And it's all on the Internet, so I have the statements that my cousin's father had submitted to Yad Vashem. So anybody who didn't get out is gone, and as I say, the ones that we know about are on my father's side: the US, Canada, and France. And my French cousin comes over a couple times a year. He's going to retire eventually from surgery and bought a place in Miami Beach. He's got the penthouse of someplace near the ocean. But he comes over once a year, nice fella. GAIL EISENBERG: Okay so Marty, you did a really fine job, but there's just a few questions, I just wanted to go back.... MS: Go ahead. GE: ...and see if you could fill in a little bit. So now this is actually about your, really more about your dad, I had a couple of questions. I thought that was really interesting that you mentioned that there were incentives that you went to Lowell, your family and do you know anything about the incentives-- was that from, who that was . . . how that was structured . . . how that worked that your dad set this knitting mill up in Lowell, Massachusetts because that's obviously the big textile area before Brooklyn. MS: There might have been tax incentives in Massachusetts for them to come up. I'm sure there must have been tax incentives. And I think the state paid to move the factory up there. GE: Okay, okay, and so your family was there it sounded like for about 15 years? MS: 1936 to 1950. GE: Okay, so about 14 years, and then you said they came here and they opened a knitting mill, is that correct? T-shirt? MS: Well they opened...my uncle opened a knitting mill as part of his business... GE: Right, right. MS: ...and my father worked for him. GE: Okay, so it was a knitting mill, not a T-shirt company. MS: No, it was part of the T-shirt company. GE: Okay. MS: So they needed the cloth, instead of my uncle buying the cloth, they knitted it themselves. GE: Okay, and so how is that business . . . then did they close the business before you and your brother-in-law went into it or? MS: They moved it, they moved their business to Reading. GE: Okay, and that became a separate business from-- MS: It became a separate business. GE: Okay. MS: They moved to Reading, and my father retired, so it was a separate business. GE: Okay. And what you and your brother-in-law started was that similar to that T-shirt business? MS: No, no. What we did, we bought closeout cloth. Somebody made a mistake. The shade of blue was a slight different from what the buyer wanted, they wouldn't take it, so we went to dealers who bought that, and there was a big one in Allentown, S. Levine and Sons. We did business with Levines and New York fabric companies that bought closeout cloth, so we had a big break on the cloth. The labor we had to pay the same as anybody else, but a big [cost] break was the cloth. And on the main floor, budget sportswear if the shade of blue was a little bit off, it didn't matter. Blue was blue. So we just make sure that if there were 30 stores, one shade of blue would go to one store and another, so you wouldn't have twenty different shades of blue in the same rack- - it looks awful. So that was our big edge on cloth. So when the lady brought me that skirt to make, it was like the cost was like 90% cloth was our big-- GE: Competitive advantage. MS: ...advantage. And the sewing was practically nothing, so we had a tremendous profit item on that one. That was great. And then I saw Levines. I saw one of the brands had orlon, wool pleated skirts and some of the same patterns that Levine had. And so I thought I'll make up some of those, I'll show them to my skirt buyers. And we bought those and sold those garments also. That was also a big number for me. GE: And so your competitive advantage or what you felt was your advantage was really that you had much lower material cost-- MS: Yes. GE: ...in producing. MS: That is correct. GE: Okay, and so just to get a little bit of a timetable then you were in business with your brother-in-law from 1960 to 1977. MS: Yes. GE: And then on your own from 1977 to 1987? MS: Yes. GE: And then at that point you sold your business, and I'm assuming that was early enough that your business was able to sell at a good price? MS: Yes. And I had no idea, but it wasn't too long after that, three years after that, that all that business moved to the Orient-- GE: Right. MS: ...and there was no more knitting here so you couldn't buy off-price cloth because there was no cloth. It was all done overseas. GE: Right, exactly. MS: And I had no knowledge of that at the time. GE: Right, so some of the contractors that you worked with, some of the sewing contractors that you were giving them business in the area, who were some of those names? MS: One was, let's see, I know one was Reilly [?], but I know some went to Gerson Lazar, who needed some business, and then a fella named Mickey Stupak in Allentown. And there was a place in Egypt, Pennsylvania. I forgot the fella's name, but we used him, and we used Hy Litwak before his factory and then Shirley Israelite had a factory, a contracting factory, we used her. And those are the ones that come to mind. GE: Right, okay, okay, good so you kept, you became their customer for a while. MS: Yes. GE: Okay. And I guess the last thing is that I was told from actually from Ivan that you had an interesting story in terms of the velour. I don't remember, I'm trying to remember, he said to ask Marty, I don't remember, it was a mistake you made, like either you were short in a color and you did a black back, and he said that it ended up becoming a very successful product. MS: He remembers that, I don't. GE: Okay. MS: I don't remember that. GE: Oh, okay. MS: But I'm sure it happened. But that lasted for a few years. It was a very good item. GE: Right, I do remember. Okay, I don't think, so we'll just ask you the couple last questions. And I'll just ask you. So you didn't make the material-- MS: No. GE: Where it was your uncle's business too-- MS: My business was buying the cloth. GE: You bought the cloth, and it's just that you bought overruns which were damaged or whatever. MS: Well it wasn't damaged. GE: But overruns, or whatever. MS: Maybe it was finished too wide. It was supposed to be finished thirty one inches but they finished it thirty inches wide. GE: Right, right. SC: That's very appropriate today, it's recycling. MS: It's what? SC: It's environmental. It's recycling. Rather than if it were, it's perfect. So the last two questions, first of all, what has made you feel the most creative in your life? MS: Creative? Well I guess in the business you're supposed to say I guess being financially successful, it gives you a sense of self-worth. It isn't the money, it's just knowing that you've accomplished something with your life, been creative. If I had made less money, I would have had the same satisfaction. But knowing that I succeeded in what I did, that's what gives me some pleasure. SC: And the last one is what you value most in life? MS: I always say seeing that my children and my grandson have grown up to be wonderful people, and my daughter-in-law is a wonderful person. To see them grow up to be fine people gives me the most, well there's not too much satisfaction when you're 82, to see that, to see my two kids, my two boys and my grandson and my daughter-in-law. My younger son married a girl from Taiwan, so, she taught him Mandarin Chinese which he won't admit to, but he speaks Mandarin and is bilingual and is eight years old, and very bright, very nice kid, so he'll do well. So that gives me my most pleasure. SC: Thank you so much. Copyright for this interview is held by Muhlenberg College. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The public can access and share the interview for educational, research, and other noncommercial purposes as long as they identify the original source. 0 /render.php?cachefile=