Stitch in time

Stitch in time
Scranton Times-Tribune
BY DAVID FALCHEK STAFF WRITER

When Renie Dougher was growing up in West Scranton in the 1970s, the garment industry looked pretty secure.

Her mother sewed for Alperin Inc. in Old Forge and her father worked as an engineer for sister company Triple A Trouser in Scranton.

Overtime was plentiful for her parents. Ms. Dougher often made dinner for her sisters when mom and dad worked late.

“Get a job there and get into the union,” her father advised her. She did.

Looking back on her 20 years in quality control at Alperin, Ms. Dougher admitted questioning her choice and her parents’ advice at times.

Her parents couldn’t have foreseen the globalization of garment manufacturing or the flood of cheap imports that obliterated hundreds of mills and dress shops in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Over the past five years, Ms. Dougher was laid off several times as Alperin adjusted. But these days, the work is steady. Alperin is not only alive, it’s hiring.

After several years of rethinking and rebuilding the business, Alperin President Janie Alperin Roth said the company needs 20 sewers to meet existing demand and handle a new subcontract to make ladies’ pants for the Alfred Dunner label.

“We need the help now,” Ms. Alperin Roth said. “There are contracts I’m not pursuing because I’m not sure we have the people to do the work.”

Adapting, surviving

Alperin is one of a few pockets of survival in the region’s garment and textile industry. After World War II, the garment industry was the most important manufacturing sector in Northeastern Pennsylvania, employing 27,650 in 1956, according to state Department of Labor & Industry. The industry was built on volume production and low cost. What remains today focuses on efficiency, specialization, and new technology.

Like the industry, Alperin is a shadow of what it was. For a time, Alperin employed 1,000 people in six locations. The empire has compressed to fewer than 100 working on a handful of steady contracts in a 50,000-square-foot facility.

In Carbondale, Gentex Corp. has never strayed far from its textile heritage, even as it re-invented itself every generation by seeking new uses for textiles.

Noble Biomaterials Inc. in Scranton, building on the venerable Sauquoit Silk Mill history, coats nylon strands with silver, giving it anti-microbial properties that kill bacteria. The thread, called “X-static” is used by leading clothing marketers and care companies worldwide for its germ-killing properties.

Today’s textile industry in Pennsylvania is based on innovation and quality, rather than quantity and cost.

Struggling to survive

As Alperin sought footing, the company split in 2001 during the recession. A year later, Ms. Alperin Roth’s father and company head Irwin Alperin became ill. She watched her father’s health — and the business — decline as she became the de facto head of the company. During almost daily visits with her father, Ms. Alperin Roth found talking about the fate of his life’s work was as painful as talking about his health.

“Dad, the work is not here,” she would say to him. “I’ll try my best, I’ll try to find something.”

After her father had died, company accountants told her to shutter the business, that continuing operations would impossible. But for her, closing Alperin would be another death.

“The employees were looking to me,” she said. “I had to find work.”

The company wriggled into niches.

She turned a liability into an asset by seeking work that had to be U.S.-made. Alperin became a certified producer of Postal Service uniforms — a job that now accounts for more than 3,000 units per week.

She developed a relationship with Flynn & O’Hara Uniform, whose owner, Ed Flynn, insists that school uniforms are made by domestic, unionized shops, rather than overseas where treatment of workers is questionable.

Alperin became more flexible and responsive, doing work that couldn’t be done overseas. Alperin can produce as few as two of an item for big-and-tall shops with just-in-time inventory.

To maintain that sort of flexibility, Alperin cross-trained employees and converted from piecemeal pay to an hourly wage so that workers wouldn’t be penalized by doing a range of jobs.

When Ms. Alperin Roth discusses business, phrases such as “getting rid of overhead,” “right-sizing,” and “staying alive,” keep coming up, words one wouldn’t expect from someone with a Master of Fine Arts. But it’s a language she had to master to keep a unionized, domestic garment shop alive.

Since its founding as Klots Throwing Co., Carbondale-based Gentex has kept itself ahead of obsolescence. After going bankrupt during the Great Depression, the reemerged company began making finished products — such as parachutes — adding a value to a commodity. Company researchers found that textiles dipped in resin could be molded — a discovery that led to its best-known product — the military flight helmet.

“Gentex remains at its core a textile company, but it has survived because it re-invents itself,” said Kenneth Lee, the company’s director of external affairs. “Gentex wouldn’t be around today if we were sewing towels.”

Still tweaking its products, Gentex is producing fabric with new characteristics, including a flame-proof fabric coated in aluminum and chemical-resistant fabrics in Archbald.

Old art, hot skill

Sewing isn’t a quaint skill of the past, like candle dipping or butter churning. Several area manufacturers, even those outside the garment industry, constantly look for skilled sewers.

Lift chair maker Golden Technology of Old Forge, has a team of more than 30 sewers, some veterans of the garment industry. Each chair is custom-made, often with a customer’s own fabric.

It’s not assembly line work, said C.J. Copley, vice president of marketing for Golden Technology.

“This is skilled labor,” Mr. Copley said. “Our gathering and stitching that simply can not be automated.”

But experienced sewers are hard to come by, and Golden has hired a handful of home-based sewers. Skilled sewers are out there, but some prefer to work from home.

“They don’t see what they do as a valuable skill,” Mr. Copley said. “In fact, sewers are very much in demand.”

Alperin pays sewers between $9 and $12 an hour.

In 2005 Specialty Defense Systems in Dunmore began adding 220 industrial sewers to produce body armor and other military gear — experience preferred, but not necessary.

The new employees prompted the company obtain a new facility in Jessup.

Start ups

Hunting gear marketer Illusion Outdoors is a local garment start-up. Upset by ill-fitting hunting gear, avid hunter Joe Carey of Wilkes-Barre quit his job as an electrical engineer, got some books from the library, and taught himself to cut fabric and sew. He produced his own line of hunting apparel.

Had it not been for the region’s reputation in the garment industry, Mr. Carey may not have attempted the move, he said.

Now operating as Illusion Outdoors, he’s been selling through his Web site www.illusionoutdoors.4t.com and at hunting fairs and shows. He’s made prototypes himself, but now Mary’s Shop in Wilkes-Barre and Mayflower Manufacturing in Old Forge, make Illusion Outdoors items.

In April, he expects to be at Gander Mountain’s Turkey U in Dickson City, selling his wares with other vendors and testing the market.

His hunting pants sell for $69, considerably more than mass-produced $39 pants. Considering that comparable pants from overseas sell for over $100 a pair, he thinks they are priced right.

He’d like to move his camouflage clothing into mass production, but would keep manufacturing here, trying to build upon the region’s fading garment heritage and lost art of sewing.

“I want hunters to have a better product, I’d also like to keep jobs in the area,” he said. “The overseas work can’t compare to workmanship locally. We had, and still have, some of the best garment people in the nation.”

Contact the writer: dfalchek@timesshamrock.com