Though you almost certainly dont know its name, youre just as certainly wearing something made by Paxar Corp.
Assuming youre wearing anything at all.
From Levis jeans to the Fruit of the Looms beneath them, and from the sturdiest Wal-Mart housedress to the most delicate diversion from Victorias Secret, Paxar is there, telling you who made the garment and how to care for it.
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Its not only union loyalists and liberals who get misty-eyed when they hear the tune Look For The Union Label.
The Hershaft family, which made Paxar what it is, also gets a certain feeling because, you guessed it, their company makes all those labels.
Paxar is big (it sees revenues of about $500 million this year), but you wouldnt know it from reading the garment press or talking to Wall Street analysts who cover the industry.
The company tends to slip through the cracks. Mutual fund salesmen dont pitch it because its neither fish nor fowl, nither textiles nor apparel.
But Paxar Chief Executive Arthur Hershaft is hell-bent on changing that through acquisitions and expansion in Latin America and Asia.
The Hershaft family labeling saga began in 1922 when Arthurs father, Leon, an immigrant from Austria, answered a want ad from the Jack Meyer Label Corp in New York, which made bow tie lables.
The tiny company needed someone to sweep the floors, which the elder Hershaft did until he learned not only English, but how to operate one of the shops printing presses.
From there, as his son tells the story, Leon became a foreman, then a general manager, married company bookeeper Florence Simons and started a family.
As the nations economy was at its lowest during the Depression, the company got its first big break when the National Recovery Act mandated consecutively numbered labels be sewn into American-made garments.
My father created the technology that made it possible to print a fabric label and put consecutive numbers on it so that every garment was unique, Hershaft said. And he got the order from the government to manufacture those millions of lables. It put the company on the map.
Then the company won the contract to manufacture numbered union labels, including the International Ladies Garment Worker Union labels.
The tags were used to track which factories were and were not unionized.
In 1946 Leon bought the business and Arthur joined the company in 1959. His cousin Victor is Paxars chief operating officer. The company went public in 1969.
Another boost came in 1971 when the Federal Trade Commission decided clothes must have care instruction labels sewn into them. This, Hershaft said, had the effect of doubling company business to about $20 million a year within three years.
Today Paxar has 30 percent of the U.S. apparel identification market and about 4 percent outside the United States, Hershaft said. That equates to about 15 percent of the $1.65 billion combined world market.
Last month the company increased its stake in bar code company Monarch Marking Systems Inc. from 49 percent to 100 percent for a price of $130 million.
For years, Monarch bar codes have marked everything from spatulas to cans of beans on store shelves. Recently Monarch grew to include wholesale packaging identification and tracking, or, put more simply, the business of printing the right lable to go on the right box to make sure it gets shipped to the right store.
In January the company acquired a 70 percent stake in a Brazilian garment labeling company and Paxar is in talks to buy the privately held Golden State Group of Companies of Taiwan. Both moves are part of Hershafts plan to make Paxars product line as available in Asia and Latin America as it is in North America and Europe.
Its surprising how unknown the company is, said Wall Street analyst Walter Glazer, of Wheat First Butcher Singer.
They dont really fit within any known industry group and people dont really know what to make of them.
But Glazer didnt hesitate for a microsecond when asked what his recommendation is Buy, he said.