Revolution in Shirts?

In a Bronx shirt factory one day last week, a woman pressed a shirt, doing her best to wrinkle the collar along the edge. But the collar wouldn't wrinkle. To Seymour J. Phillips, 46, president of Phillips-Jones Corp., this was a historic occasion, as historic as the one more than 20 years ago when the company brought out its famed Van Heusen collar* and revolutionized the shirt industry. Phillips hoped to start another revolution with his no-wrinkle collar. He had worked the trick by weaving the several plies of cloth used for an ordinary collar into a single thickness.

The shirt industry is showing signs of wear around the edges, now that the wartime shortage is over, and Shirtman Phillips could not have picked a better time for something new. He is an old hand at new selling tricks. A grandson of Founder Moses Phillips, he stepped into Phillips-Jones's presidency in 1939 at a time when the company had just turned in a loss of $937,186. Its stock, which had once sold at 98 1/4, had sunk to 2 3/4. At 36, Phillips knew plenty about the shirt business; for 15 years he had clerked in the stockroom of the family plant, worked on credit, advertising and sales. Thanks partly to the wartime boom in textiles, but even more to Phillips' shrewd, hard-selling management, the company's sales began to climb rapidly.

Last year, when shirt sales began to sag, Phillips proved that he knew how to find customers in a buyers' market. More & more men were wearing ties with fancy, outlandish patterns that clashed with old-style striped shirts. Phillips switched three of Phillips-Jones's eleven plants to full production of pastel-colored shirts which would go well with loud ties.

The company, which had spent only $7,500 on advertising in 1939, splurged much of its $1,000,000 ad budget pushing the new "bold look." It ran sales up to a new high of $23.7 million (though, with higher costs, the net slipped to $1,000,000), second to Cluett, Peabody's (TIME, Oct. 11). Convinced that he has a winner in his new wrinkleproof collar, Phillips plans to push it with his biggest ($1,500,000) advertising campaign yet.

* Named for Inventor John M. Van Heusen who, by weaving cloth in a curve, achieved a collar with a graceful "fold" line, avoiding the "gaps" that occur when a straight piece of cloth is bent into a circle.

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