Earnshaw's | Infants', Girls', Boys' Wear Review | 2010 • September

Even with your background in the legwear business, there must have been difficulties early on. What was your biggest challenge?

When I went out on my own, I knew nobody overseas. Learning the supply chain from Asia and how to get product to market was interesting and a learning curve. When I started, the bulk of the business was in Korea, then it moved from Korea to Taiwan, then Taiwan to China. There were bumps in the road, but you figure it out. They’re good partners over there. But China has changed. It is absolutely a different model and more dynamic now than it has been over the last 20 years—and that affects everything, so you have to be on your game. Sourcing is my next initiative. Everything is set here in New York, but supply chain efficiencies and getting product to market and dealing with the new China is next. I’ve hired an in-house head of sourcing and factory compliance so that, just as we’re best in class, we’re only going to work with best-in-class factories that are approved, audited, and socially and environmentally compliant. It’s key. I’m following the Puma brand’s example. Social and environmental compliance is huge for them. We’re looking at ways of using less packaging. We’re looking at how we can give our factories better, quicker information so that their time-in-action calendar runs smoothly rather than having to make last-minute changes, which forces them to have three or four different shifts plus overtime. I’m looking at what we can do here to make a change over there, which will benefit us here.

And now you’re not just sourcing overseas, you’re shipping worldwide.

We’re in every retailer in the U.S. [that we want to ship] and are now shipping globally. Dubai, Panama, the U.K., Australia—these are all countries that are dying for our product. Instead of a brand going to get European licensees, we now have United Legwear Asia, which opened two years ago. And we’re shipping globally so there’s one consistent sock or legwear out there.

The global nature of this business often proves to be the biggest hurdle for new companies—even those with great products. At your size, you must have certain advantages.

I have an opportunity because people are coming to us knowing our buying power, our warehousing power, and our sales and marketing power. We can take a brand or a company and plug it into the model.

It’s efficiency of scale.

I have the staff in New York for sales. I have the systems in a 100,000-square-foot Edison, N.J., warehouse. I have a 75,000square-foot warehouse in Commerce, Calif. So we’re ready to plug in other businesses. I look at companies that have a great core and a great product but they’re drowning in today’s business culture. For instance, I could lower people’s freight charges by 20 percent because of the number of containers we’re bringing in. If someone is paying 10- to 15-percent warehousing charges, we [can lower that].

That’s 25 percent found right there. So I think people in the kids’ industry are really looking at United Legwear and companies like us to see how we can do something together. You have to look at business in different ways now. You have to find ways to survive.

BabyLegs is a good example of a company that you plugged into the model. Why did that acquisition make sense?

What I saw in BabyLegs is a great name and brand equity and the respect the brand has with the mommy bloggers and cyber moms. It meant something other than being the biggest. BabyLegs had a great run, but with the credit crunch, banks were clamping down and BabyLegs was a couple weeks away from disappearing. I saw the brand at retail and gave the owner a call. I’ve pumped thousands of dollars >36