Masters of Reinvention

In the mid-1980s, the overall business of shirt manufacturing in the United States started moving to Latin America where the quality was excellent, turnaround fast and labor costs a fraction of what they were in this country. Clearly the business model of making shirts in U.S. factories and selling them through middlemen (designers) was changing. Sacher convinced some department store buyers that they did not need big-name designer brands on basic dress shirts (e.g., straight and button-down collars in solid white and blue pinpoint oxford fabrics). Sacher began working directly with the stores’ merchandise managers creating simple, store-branded shirts, leaving the fancier striped and checked shirts to the designers.