Learning Different Overseas Markets 1969 to 1977

After returning to live on Long Island, New York from Hong Kong in September 1968 in began to work out of New York City. As I mentioned previously , my first employer after Macy's was a name brand apparel manufacturing conglomerate that produced Women's, Men's and Children apparel. In that position, I continued working with Far Eastern suppliers in order to supplement this firm's domestic production with various imported apparel items. After two years with this firm, I joined a small startup import buying agency with two young entrepreneurial types in Philadelphia, PA. Again my focus was purchasing from Far Eastern suppliers, but the product range broadened from apparel to anything we could import for our clients. Since one of the partner's family was in the plumbing supply business, we even imported steel pipe and pipe fittings from South Korea. My family moved from Long Island to Cherry Hill, NJ which was a short commute to downtown Philadelphia.

Testing the Waters for New Ideas

This type of work was exciting but not very profitable. One of our ventures involved sending cancelled checks from Hong Kong to New York for clearance. In banking term, the time it took for the cancelled checks to reach a New Clearing house was called the float. We arranged to ship these documents via air freight with expedited customs clearance at Newark airport and truck delivery to Manhattan. The float time was cut from about 7 days to 2 days which saved the bank thousands of dollars. Unfortunately we did not have the financial resources to develop this business. When I think about this situation now, we were the forerunners of today's air express companies. Of course today this type of check clearance is done electronically almost instantly. After the financing ran out this firm closed, but the two doing this pioneering work was a great experience.

Another Firm and Different Experiences

Another new position, this time with a large Men's and Boy's clothing importer-distributor located in New York City. This firm was doing business as both an importer-distributor and import buying agent. This was the firm's business model. For each season (spring/summer and fall/winter) the staff would develop  a line of Men's and Boy's apparel consisting of dress shirts, sport shirts, dress and casual trousers, jeans, outerwear and sport coats. These lines consisted of several hundred items. We would send our designs or prototypes to manufacturers in Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan through our offices or agents. We also purchased knitwear from Italy. My responsibility was primarily to develop the new styles for each season and to oversee the quality control and timely delivery of our purchases. Each season started providing our suppliers with instructions as to what samples such be prepared for our arrival in the Far East. Upon arrival in each country we would visit each existing supplier and review the samples they had prepared in advance of our arrival. Correction were made and we also visited new potential suppliers and requested sample from them. After this first round of visits we would return to each country accompanied by buyers from several large size retailer chain stores. We sold them selected items on a commission basis, therefore those firms purchased and imported these purchases into their stores inventory. Although these transactions only brought commission income to our firm (usually 6 % of FOB prices they paid), we also benefitted from their early purchase decisions as we would then buy large quantities of the same or similar items relying on their interest in certain products for the coming season. Our purchases were then offered to the retail market from our inventory imported by us and stored in a NJ warehouse. Since we took the risk on these inventoried items we acted as a merchant/importer and added a markup and sold them at a profit rather than just acting as an agent. Working with foreign suppliers as contract manufacturers is today a common supply chain strategy that has become a standard way of doing business for many American firms. since the early 1950's this was a common practice in the apparel, toy and novelty industries. Therefore I became familiar with this way of doing business earlier than most American businessmen. (Travel Log 1968-1977)