Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 7, 1994 TAG: 9408060008
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Anonymous callers generally say the Roanoke company is being purchased by one of the brand-name national apparel manufacturers: Liz Claiborne Inc. or DonnKenny Inc.
Halmode stays on the business gossip circuit because, said its chairman and chief executive officer Robert Adler, quite frankly, the place is for sale.
Or, Halmode might purchase someone else.
Or, merge with another company, he said.
"Halmode has always been and always will be looking for ways to improve its synergy," said Adler of the privately owned company.
Adler's base is the New York sales and marketing office, although the company's headquarters is in Roanoke, where half of the 500 employees work at a plant on Wertz Road Northeast.
"You can't sit still in this business," Adler said in a telephone interview. "If you sit still, you die."
Representatives from most major, and minor, companies in the same business as Halmode have walked the Roanoke plant's corridors, which employees have decorated with life-size paintings of Halmode designs through the years.
Robert Gregory, a fabric cutter, with the help of a number of other employees did the fashion wall art and the French cafe scene on a wall in the company cafeteria. Those touches say a lot about how workers think about the company, which one of them describes as "a fantastic place to work."
"Everybody tries to work together," said Susie Kearns, a Buchanan resident who started there in 1967. "When I first went to work there I said every day I was going to quit, but I stayed."
Adler wants to preserve the culture that prompts comments like Kearns' and said he has rejected offers when the other company's ``culture didn't fit'' with Halmode. Efforts to find a buyer or a partner aren't aimed at diminishing Halmode, he said.
Adler added that he is nowhere near ready to quit work himself. His son just joined the business.
\ Halmode began 30 years ago as a private company and some years later was restructured into an employee-owned outfit. In the late 1980s, Adler and other investors bought out the employees.
But a team atmosphere at Halmode is reinforced by Adler, said employee Lowell Foutz. It also has a lot to do with the history of the apparel business in Roanoke.
A number of the longtime Halmode employees and company founder Herbert Kurshan worked together at the former Kenrose Manufacturing Co. Foutz was at Kenrose 13 years before joining Halmode, where he is manager of the cutting room. He recalled that Adler once was a "hotshot" Kenrose salesmen.
Kenrose was sold to Genesco Inc., a Nashville, Tenn., shoe manufacturer and wholesaler. Genesco liquidated Kenrose, but by then Halmode was up and operating.
Halmode has three plants in Virginia - Roanoke, Covington and New Castle - and a Vintage Blue junior sportswear division in California and contract sewing operations in Malaysia and Singapore., plus the New York sales office.
All told, the company employs about 1,000 people.
Research and development and processing divisions also are n Roanoke, as is a retail outlet that is open on Friday afternoons and Saturdays. The company once had several Dress House outlet stores. It closed all but the Lynchburg store in 1987.
For several years, Halmode also had a plant in Moneta. When it closed, the company began sending vans to bring workers to Roanoke. Two vans go daily to Moneta and one to Bedford.
Halmode makes 54 percent of its goods in the United States, Adler said. Its labels include Nursemaids, Sunshine and Snowbird uniforms, Kathie Lee for Plaza South, Melissa Harper or MHM, Halmode Petites, Halmode Plus and Great Times maternity wear.
Kathie Lee for Plaza South is Halmode's top-of-the-line label, dresses that sell at retail for $70 to $100 and compete with labels such as Leslie Faye.
Although the market for uniforms has shrunk considerably in recent years, Halmode has been able to hold onto its share, Adler said.
The company has prospered, though, because it focused on the 35- to 49-year-old customer who accounts for about 30 percent of all dresses sold. The overall dress market fell from over $7 billion in 1989 to $6.8 billion sales last year, and Halmode's sales went from $70 million to $100 million in the same period, Adler said.
As a private company, Halmode does not release financial figures such as net income.
Compared to the giant public companies such as Liz Claiborne, Halmode would rank as the 22nd or 23rd largest in the country, he said.
One of Halmode's specialities is clothing that features labor-intensive handiwork such as fine embroidery, which it is able to produce at attractive prices because the work is done outside the United States.
Adler said he is proud he recognized the potential of manufacturing in the Orient 18 years ago.
"If we didn't have the maximum domestic and import mix, we wouldn't have survived," he said.
H.D. Kemp, general manager, who has more than 20 years with the company, said Halmode was "the first company in China."
The company also cuts production costs by doing some parts of its domestic label manufacturing offshore. For example, the dress fabric might be cut in Roanoke and the pieces sewn in Costa Rica.
The Roanoke sewing plant is a mix of old methods and new technology. Computers are used to lay out pattern pieces on fabric for the least amount of waste, but a wrinkled sleeve on a finished garment is pressed by hand.
Memo: ***CORRECTION***