Dave Tracy and Seymour Seidman in the Avanti showroom during the 1990s.
A few of us – maybe four or five – were standing around talking outside the church where there had just been a funeral mass for Dave Tracy, the legendary executive of the home textiles industry responsible for helping to bring Royal Velvet, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Donna Karan to the market.
“How sad to see what the home textiles industry has turned into,” one said. “There used to be brands and programs that every retailer in the country in a channel had to have,” said another. “Now, it’s become an OEM business where every store has a different mix and there are no national brands.”
“It’s the exact opposite of what Dave Tracy believed in and made successful,” said a third.
The conversation is true, even if the words are a bit paraphrased. And the speakers are best left unidentified as some still earn their livings in the industry while others have retired and are in no position to do anything about the current situation.
Dave Tracy, I’m sure, could sell private label tonnage when he had to keep his mills running, and not every program he developed worked. Nobody was that good.
But his focus on brands and marketing those brands represented the pinnacle of the home textiles industry and produced revenues and profits for manufacturers and retailers alike that no doubt have been duplicated since but never in the same way. The industry’s reliance on dedicated private and/or captured brands developed at the behest of their retail customers is a sad state of affairs that just doesn’t have to be.
You may question that and point about that the retailers are so much bigger than their vendors and so can control all the shots. But that’s not always true. Think Dyson vacuum cleaners, think Waterford crystal stemware, think KitchenAid stand mixers. These are all national brands that every store in their respective channels must carry to be able to offer their customers a proper assortment. The same exact product is offered in multiple stores in the same mall, along the same strip of the highway and on the same online sites. And the world doesn’t end.
The Royal Velvet towel wall at JCP in 2019.
That was what Dave Tracy did with Royal Velvet way back when. Stores fought over getting the line – to the extent that one retailer of the era that was locked out of matrix took action. Linens’n Things famously put up a billboard along the route Fieldcrest executives drove into their Manhattan office, pleading to get access to the brand. Think about something like that happening now.
As much as that group at the bottom of those church steps on that morning a few weeks ago lamented the sad state of affairs the industry finds itself in with respect to national brands, there were glimmers of hope that perhaps it didn’t have to be that way. Could the remaining larger suppliers in the business put some marketing muscle behind their programs and force retailers to carry these products? It could happen, even if the effort would require serious investments and even more serious patience. It’s not impossible.
One likes to think Dave Tracy will be up there watching.
See also:
Warren Shoulberg has reported on the gift and home industry for most of his career. He is often quoted in national media, such as The New York Times and CNN, and contributes to PBM publications, Forbes.com and The Robin Report.
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