Soma – Harold Trigg

Cynthia Bowers: Good evening, ladies and gentleman, welcome to this history talk. It’s my pleasure tonight to introduce Harold Trigg. Harold was born and raised in Wellington and he came to Hastings to live [in] 1989, and no doubt he’ll give us all the background to that shortly. Harold has some amazing connections that are really, really relevant to Landmarks actually, because in 1988 Jeremy Dwyer was the mayor, and he was quite instrumental in Soma’s story. So that’s quite a nice linkage for our Landmarks history talks. I’m sure all of you know about Soma President; I won’t go into a lot of detail about that because Harold’s going to talk about it, so without further ado would you join me in welcoming him, please. [Applause]

Harold Trigg: Cynthia, thank you. I’ve just spotted one of my staff members here … hello, Neil.

Right. I guess as I was researching for tonight I thought, ‘Everyone has a story’, and I guess it’s the collective stories that we all have that make up our day-to-day history. It’s been quite a journey because I was looking back on really, my family’s history. So it’s going to be a roller-coaster tonight because that’s what the rag trade, or the clothing trade … already there’s a lady in the front who was at Ray-Lin Clothing … you know what it’s been like. The success of the rag trade in New Zealand has mirrored the political history of the country; and we’re going, in two weeks’ time, to the polls again, so there’ll be quite a bit of reference to politicians from the past as we go through this story.

[Shows slides throughout]

It starts back in the 1920s with this gentleman, George Stanley Amos, who was my grandfather. He had been [a] buyer in London for Ross & Glendinning for eight years; came back in 1926 and thought he would import underwear, haberdashery and hosiery into New Zealand. He started in a little office down in Wellington, and perhaps I’ll tell you a little bit about his history because he’d left school at thirteen; his father had died, he had no formal education, and he set up one of the first apparel companies in New Zealand. We’re a very, very old company in terms of apparel history. He said at the time, the only manufacturers in New Zealand were making boots, heavy woollen clothing and woollen socks. Everything else was imported – ‘bout ninety per cent of the apparel in the market was imported. It’s cyclical, because if you look at the apparel industry today, I would think ninety-five per cent of what people wear is now imported. So it’s gone full cycle.

In [the] early 1930s we were in the middle of a depression; government decides we’ve got to have jobs for people, and we can’t keep importing and using valuable overseas exchange. So they slapped prohibitive duties on the importation of clothing. This was the catalyst for a lot of manufacturers to get under way, so we grew behind a protective wall of import licensing and prohibitive tariffs. And that’s how a lot of manufacturing in New Zealand got started. He always joked; he said, “I started manufacturing around about the same time as Jim Wattie.” I think the manufacturing company for Soma started in about the early 1930s; Jim Wattie was round about the same time. He said, “He grew significantly bigger than I did, in terms of population.” But in the sixties Soma had a staff in excess of five hundred people.

One of his earliest lines … because he manufactured a very simple garment and the ladies will know all about these, called ‘bloomers’. [Chuckles] And one of his early promotional catch-lines was, ‘Ladies’ Fleecy-lined Bloomers; Shilling a Leg’; [chuckles] ‘Seats Free’. [Chuckles] ‘They won’t Itch but You’ll be Tickled by the Price.’ [Laughter] That’s very much a 1930s promo line. [Laughter]

1938, import licensing was introduced, so it became even more difficult to bring clothing into the country. In the war years, the factories were seconded to making army clothing for both the New Zealand Army and the American Armed Forces. Stan Amos, from a person who’d left school at thirteen, rose to be New Zealand Manufacturers’ Federation President in 1964. He died [at] ninety-two [in] 1982; he was coming into the office. I remember the call … “He’s not going to come today.” And I took over Soma from then. So that’s a little bit of history about our founder, so I’ve got really the rag trade in my DNA.

A little bit about our company name – Soma President. It’s an unusual name and a lot of people ask me, “Where does it come from?” If you look up the word ‘soma’, ‘soma’ comes from the Greek word meaning ‘body’, as opposed to ‘soul’. And I’ve always thought we’ve been in the body business; in fact there’s a science called Somatology, which is the study of living bodies. And I feel after a lifetime in this business that’s what I’ve had to study, because we’re an underwear company and that’s what we’ve had to do – clothe all shapes and sizes. There’s not one size fits all. Soma is also the reverse of Stan Amos’ name. Amos is a very Jewish name, and interestingly there was [were] a lot of Jewish contacts he had in the industry. And that’s Soma … I don’t think this dates from the 1930s but it’s certainly [on] the box that a pair of bloomers would’ve been packed in in the 1940s and the ’50s. So that’s the brand name.

The President – where did that come from? In 1954 on a tip from Farmers’ Trading Company, he flew to Winston-Salem in the United States, because there was one underwear brand that dominated New Zealand, and that was ‘Jockey’. That was also an American brand of underwear. So he flew to the States; he fronted up to the Hanes Corporation in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and said, “I want to see the President.” And they said, “Well, you can’t. You’ve got to have an appointment.” He said, “Well, I’ve flown all the way from New Zealand; I want to see him.” So he was ushered in, met Huber Hanes, and Huber said to him, “I never allow an audience without a formal appointment, but I like your style; you’ve come a long way.” And [a] couple of hours later he walked out with the Hanes’ franchise and the rights to manufacture Hanes’ underwear for New Zealand. In 1999, Hanes Corporation, which was then owned by Sara Lee [Corporation], finally took the name back; but for forty-six years we made Hanes underwear in New Zealand, and that was the next big push for product for our company in New Zealand. So there’s the derivation of the name; ‘President’, he always said, reminded him of the top office in the land – so if you think Donald Trump at the moment. So Soma President, the two together, that’s where our name comes from.

At the end of the war it was very, very hard to get staff, and what the industry did was – they took work out to rural New Zealand and we colonised the southern part of the North Island. First of all there was a factory established in Otaki … Otaki Textiles … and Peter Fraser, the then Prime Minister, opened that factory in 1949. Interestingly enough, the Otaki factory was run by a Viennese Jew, who’d escaped during the war before the Nazis invaded Vienna. The name of that first manager was Kurt Hager. His son, Nicky Hager, is the political writer; Kurt Hager was Nicky’s dad, so an interesting connection. Whenever I see Nicky Hager in print, I remember that connection. A factory soon followed in Levin making shirts and pyjamas, so we were starting to move up the island. [In] 1950 a factory was built in Hastings to make underwear, 705 Heretaunga Street. And that grew to be quite a factory; by 1960 that factory was producing half a million garments a year; singlets, T-shirts and briefs … Fig Leaf Briefs with the Hanes label.

So we’ve moved up one side – we’ve got to the Hawke’s Bay. In 1954 we needed fabric to make all this underwear so we set up a knitting operation in Masterton. So we had our own knitting making our own fabrics; and then a factory was set up in 1973 in Waipukurau. They used to make [cough] up to ten thousand singlets and t-shirts a week. This was when the volume part of the business was on a roll in New Zealand, but all protected behind a big tariff wall and import licensing.

It’s time I think, to share an underwear story, because over my lifetime in the industry we’ve collected a lot of underwear stories. One of the earliest people that [who] contributed to our industry was Mabel Howard [chuckles] – the feisty little lawyer from Sydenham in Christchurch, who was an MP [Member of Parliament] from 1946 to 1969. Mabel Howard has the distinction of being the first female in the British Commonwealth who was an MP and a Cabinet Minister – the first cabinet minister in the British Commonwealth. But her claim to fame really, is because of the day in 1954 when she held up a pair of Soma bloomers. And she was appealing to the industry; she held up two pairs of bloomers – one was a Soma garment; we know that – and appealed for standardising of female sizes in terms of Manufacturing New Zealand. There’s a special story that links to Soma with Mabel Howard and her bloomers – we were having trouble bringing in elastic to make the waistbands for bloomers. And Stan Amos asked Mabel what he should do, because he said, “If we don’t get this elastic, we’re going to have pants falling down everywhere.” She took her bloomers back into The House, and it’s reported in Hansard, and held the bloomers up and said, “If we don’t get licensing through to this company, these will not hold up.” [Laughter] So Mabel Howard was a very important part of our history.

When we started making Hanes underwear we had some wonderful feedback from customers, because we were competing with Jockey and we had to be a little bit different. I have kept one of the best letters we ever had from a customer. So we’ve had a female underwear story; now we’ll have the male one. It was a letter received on 30th May 1975 from Claude Cash, and he was a Hastings man. And I don’t know whether anyone ever remembers him, but he’s a wonderful poet. Does someone remember Claude?

Audience: Yes.

Harold: ‘Cause I never met him.

Audience member: He had a bike shop.

Harold: He had a bike shop. Well, this is his poem, and he says:

‘Hats off to the man called Hanes
Who used his God-given brains
To design the men’s coloured brief
All through the years
On the verge of tears
I have tried to gain some relief

I’ve tried various brands
Displayed on the stands
But the result was just as before
Tight in the crutch
Which hurt very much
On a band that made one quite sore.

Passing Woolworth’s one day
I saw on display
Briefs in every kind of hue
So I went inside,
To the man I replied
‘I’ll take a size 42’
Oh, what a relief!’

[Chuckles]

‘When I tried on this brief
It filled my heart with joy
I felt so free
It reminded me
When I ran as a pantless boy.’ [Laughter]

‘From a converted and very grateful customer, Claude Cash’.

So we continued making Hanes underwear; 1974 we supplied the 10th British Commonwealth Games in Christchurch will all the t-shirts, because t-shirts at that stage were made in New Zealand. Seventy thousand t-shirts – a wonderful order to get … one garment, all white, printed on the front.

Now we move into the more exciting times – the eighties. 1988 we were going to move and consolidate all the factories into the Hawke’s Bay; I was going to move my family and bring everyone up to the Bay. 1988 we had a disastrous fire in Wellington. It was caused by someone putting a butt in the rubbish, and so in February we had our fire number one. The entire Kent Terrace factory in Wellington was wiped out, plus the office, so we had to put a move to the Bay on fast-track. So we consolidated a Masterton Knitting Mill, a Wellington Head Office and factory, Waipukurau and Hastings, all to Hastings in 1988 – and our Auckland warehouse. So we had everything on one spot, in Wilson Road.

So we set up in Wilson Road, and I’m going to show you … Jeremy Dwyer was magnificent with the Council because they supported what we were doing and gave us some rates relief; because at that time the Hawke’s Bay was in a difficult … it was difficult to find work. So here we were bringing all these jobs to town. We made a t-shirt and a sweatshirt as a backdrop to our opening. The label in it here says, ‘One size fits all’. [Laughter] And it’s a perfectly scaled model of a t-shirt. We think it’s about a 15X. [Chuckles] I’ve got a big gentleman in Hastings who wants me to make big t-shirts; he said, “I think I’ve got someone who might almost fit that.” [Chuckles] So we’re waiting to see if we can, because we want to see if someone can actually try it. So that was the background for our opening … “Gidday from the Hawke’s Bay”, and we had a wonderful celebration. It was seen as a vote of confidence in Hawke’s Bay.

So we get underway; we have something like a hundred and twenty, hundred and thirty people on site; 23rd November 1988, disaster strikes. This time we were arsoned by one of our own people. And there’s a picture of a young boy in the front with his hands over his mouth – that turned out to be the arsonist. There’s the photo of the factory. What actually happened, on the night shift – we were now knitting fabric in Hawke’s Bay – this young boy had been a recent employee of the company; he’d nicked a power lead, and the supervisor came down and accused him of that while they were having a smoko. He was so angry he went around the corner, pulled out his cigarette lighter, pushed some pallets into the side of the factory and lit them. Unbeknown to him, it was right where the gas mains came into the site, so once the gas main had been exposed and the heat had generated to a certain level, we had a blow-torch. And the assessors looking at this said they’d never seen anything like it. These were great metal beams and they’d just been reduced, like plasticine, to nothing. We never salvaged anything. It was a few weeks before Christmas; we had the entire stock of underwear for Christmas trade; and we had a hundred and twenty people who came to work the next day – where was their job? And – it was absolutely amazing. But the insurance company wasn’t happy at all because we had an eighteen-month indemnity to protect us, but we’d had a fire in February; now we had fire number two. And people said to me, “You can survive one fire, but in business you will never survive two.” But I had a wonderful team of people. The Super-Fit factory, which was the opposition, said, “Well, when we go home at night, you can bring all your girls into the factory and sew during the night to get you back into business.” Because the biggest danger when you lose everything is that the door is open for the opposition to move in and take your patch. But all credit; it was an amazing fire.

But the insurance company said, “Right. The Government has announced from here on in, the tariffs are going to track down, so you’re in trouble.” In fact, the insurance company thought I’d … initially … lit the fire, and they said – there’s a [an] expression: “We think it could be a Jewish stocktake.” [Chuckles] But I said to the insurance company, “It’s totally the reverse. The industry may be on a slippery slope, but we’re breaking all barriers with the success of our new product.” And the new product was this … it was the Beefy-T. It was also a sub-brand of Hanes in the States, and what I’ve put on the board here is the marketing we put in behind this brand. In fact the Americans, when I showed it to them, said, “You have done this better than we did in the States.” We took the image of the young guy on the bike; that was a photo shot in the South Island looking up towards the Alps. And what it was was a white t-shirt – in fact, the one I held up is a bigger version of the same thing. [Coughing]

But it was the marketing; and it went with a pair of Levi jeans. So we had commercials, but what had happened was – and this is the interesting thing – all the other companies in New Zealand saw what success we were having with this and they climbed in and took the brand from us. We had Hallenstein’s; we had Farmers; we had The Warehouse; we had Glasson’s; we had Kmart; we had Deka. Everybody wanted, and were calling their t-shirts, Beefy-Ts. What I did was I went to the States and I said to the lawyers at Hanes, “What do we do?” They said, “Fight every one with a ‘misuse of trademark’, and there’s no bottom to the fighting fund.”

So I put up on the board, “There is only one genuine Beefy-T”. So the more we complained and took legal action against all these big players in the market, the higher our profile went. We made one year, two hundred and fifty thousand t-shirts – at a time when the industry was meant to be going down the gurgler as the tariffs were reduced. So we were very fortunate, and the insurance company helped us rebuild and equip us with state-of-the-art plant, so we were very lucky the way we came out. And so you can see that with our industry, it’s been a bit of a roller-coaster.

But it didn’t last for long. We had our insurance money and then the tariff reductions started to bite. On 1st May 1998 the apparel industry right throughout New Zealand marched on their local councils, and Jeremy Dwyer was waiting for us and he was tremendous in his support. We called it ‘Operation Mayday’ … it was a pause for a cause; we wanted to halt the reduction in tariffs. We marched right thorough town – and I think Ray-Lin were involved in this – every apparel manufacturing person was on [in] the parade. What distinguished our parade into town was that we had several of the men wearing only their underwear, but surrounded in a carton. And our message was, “We’ve stripped it down to our underwear, so if it keeps going, there’ll be nothing left.” But we got some tremendous profile with these pictures of men walking down the street, bare top and bottom, but just a carton round the outside. Jeremy supported our pause for a cause, but it didn’t matter; it was a Labour government, and this is the era of Rogernomics. And the Labour Government said, “We’re going to free up the industry; we’re going to dismantle import licensing; and we’re going to put tariff reduction to zero by 2005.” So this is when it got really, really difficult.

Along came a gentleman called Jeremy Moon from Icebreaker, and he’d worked out that there was a way to market merino wool for people to wear as an every-day item, not just for sports apparel. He was looking for people to manufacture, and we ended up becoming one of the main factories for making ‘next-to-the-skin’ merino, for Icebreaker. And we enjoyed that association right through to 2007 when he finally took it all to China. But it got Soma out of jail again, because we could start making raw material from New Zealand. And I thought I’d show you the sort of thing we made, and I’m not trying to be political directly, but [laughter] I bought a t-shirt for Lawrence [Yule, mayor of Hastings 2001-2017; current National Party MP] and a top for Anna Lorck [former Labour Party MP]. [Laughter] Those two garments are modelled on an Icebreaker pattern, and that’s superfine merino. And the trick was the marketing; everybody has heard, no doubt, of *Shrek [male sheep, unshorn for six years] and it was his brilliance in terms of marketing a New Zealand raw material and taking it to the world – and Shrek was one of the catalysts. He got huge hits globally, and today Icebreaker is a leading brand. But Soma was right in there manufacturing these garments for a period of seven or eight years; it was a wonderful experience. And we still do. We still stock these and sell these down the road.

But we had to look for other things, and I guess it was as people like Icebreaker moved off-shore. And some of the other companies we’ve made for all did the same, and I’ll list some of them: Pumpkin Patch, Norsewear, Swazi, Swanndri, Hallenstein’s, Glasson’s – we made for all of these people. But it became very, very difficult; but what we were able to do – Jeremy Moon of Icebreaker got us into making merino that we could then export – and we developed, through the internet, markets in the UK, [United Kingdom] Ireland, Canada, Switzerland, Norway. So we were able to export, and one of the biggest we ever did eventually … the last big export order we did … and the industry by this stage had really tracked down to a very, very small industry … was sixty thousand units of polypropylene which we supplied to Japan in 2011. Sitting in the audience, in the second row from the back, is Alan Berry. Alan has been the Soma mentor for the last ten years, and Alan will verify that it was a nightmare order to do, that we weren’t big enough as a factory to make sixty thousand units, so we co-opted little factories all around New Zealand. I think at one stage we had eight factories making for this order. But … see two forty-foot containers go off to Japan with export product, and a lot of it made in the Hawke’s Bay; it was something.

The last seven years have been very, very difficult, and Alan’s been with me as my mentor and my white knight through all of this, and I pay tribute, Alan, to you tonight, for the enormous support. “Cause we’ve had to find things that we could do with everybody heading off-shore. We really became what we would call a ‘CMT’, a cut, make and trim business, making for other people. And we’ve made for most of the brands in New Zealand. We’ve gone for niches that nobody else wants to make. I’m going to show you a couple, and I’m wondering if anyone knows what this might be. It’s one-legged; I’ll give you a clue. The style number we use for this is ‘One Leg Un’. It’s a one-legged underpant, and we make these, and we have made these for twenty-odd years for the Artificial Limb Board. It’s for people with stumps, because they can’t get, you know, a pouch for their stump. Now, the problem we’ve got is that we have a fly front, and there are left and right-leg stumps, so we have to turn it around that way if the stump is the other leg. But we’ve just received another order for One Leg Uns. So when we talk of ‘niche’, these are tiny markets where no-one else will make.

The other one we do quite well with is big singlets. That’s a 6X singlet, and when it’s fully extended we can put three of our sewers in it; [chuckles] one out the neck and one out each arm. [Chuckles] But you’d be staggered at the number of people who want big singlets. And now we’ve got someone who’s approached us to take it from 6X right up to 10X – 7, 8, 9 and 10. So these are all niches, but we continue to do this.

And we’re still exporting – not big, but we still export. We’ve made cloth nappies; we’ve recently done a run of merino baby blankets for the hospitals for the Pepi-pod Programme, which is encouraging young mums to swaddle new-borns in merino, because a baby [babies] for the first three months of their life [lives] cannot adjust their own temperature[s]. And we’ve just done, in the last twelve months … the Otago University are [is] doing a study on sleeping bags made out of merino as a thing to promote for young mums as well … and we’ve made the research sleeping bags for the Otago University.

Out there there are lots of different niches, and we continue to search for them, but sadly Soma is now a virtual company; there’s only me left. And so it’s gone full cycle from the days when Stan Amos started importing, to now we face an importing … So now there’s only me. But the new model – and all credit to Alan, he’s helped us tremendously with this – we now have the machinery out in the homes of all our sewers; so we cut the work centrally, we distribute the work to our sewers in their homes, and then take it back. So this way, they’re all their own bosses; it conforms with modern labour laws; but it’s also scary. It has been scary when we couldn’t give work for our team for a whole year. There are peaks and troughs in the year, so this way if the ladies are not sewing, they can have other jobs. And some of them, you know, get involved with the apple pack houses and also with the grapes.

So, I’ve acknowledged Jeremy who helped us get here. You can see it’s been a roller-coaster; and we’ve been at the mercy of current government policy all the way through. So we’ve got one of the most open [cough] borders in the world today, and there’s virtually nothing left of the industry. There’s very, very little, and it’s quite sad, but there’s a few niches left for us.

So I think that’s about me – has that given you a flavour of ..? But we’ve made our home in Soma; it has made its home in Hastings, and we’ve been very grateful for the support and the wonderful teams we’ve had supporting us all the way through.

[Applause]

Thank you, Harold. I’m sure there’ll be questions if you’re happy to answer them?

Yes, yes.

Question: I didn’t get a very clear understanding of how the ‘President’ got in there.

Harold: Okay. Well, President … the Chief Executive or the top man in the company in the States is called, ‘The President’. Donald Trump, President of the … but it’s mirrored in big corporates. So the Hanes Corporation in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the top man was the president. So Stan Amos went across there; he went right to the man leading this. This was a family that had been in the cotton business … one of the earlier ones in the States, early 1900s … in the cotton fields. So he said, “What’s the highest office in the land?” The highest man at Hanes Corporation – the president. It has always been a mouthful, so we normally abbreviate it just to ‘Soma’. And you’ll notice that [it’s] still the name that we have carried on our singlets.

Question: You’ve heard of the character called Captain Underpants – anything to do with your company?

Harold: Captain Underpants! No. I’d love to get a copy though.

Comment: Might be another niche market.

Harold: I feel my education is not complete. [Chuckles] Thank you. No, I’ll follow that up. Fantastic – I’ll put them on my reading list.

Question: You briefly mentioned Ray-Lin …

Harold: Yes.

… now Ray Ball was a great friend of mine, and he was a very clever man in what he could do. And he set up that business in one of our buildings and he did well. And he obviously helped you out?

Harold: The Hastings industry was actually quite significant. And the decentralisation after the war was because we couldn’t get labour, and there was a vast supply of female labour in rural areas. So there was Ray Ball with Ray-Lin; there was Superfit Textiles – Peter Morrison; there was Soma, and I think there were other ones around. Yeah. No, Hastings had a very big … And there was another big grouping in Levin; ‘nother big grouping in [cough] Palmerston North; and just about [cough] every rural town in New Zealand, had its own clothing factory.

Question: What happened to the fellow who lit the fire?

Harold: Well that’s interesting. I can’t tell you his name. His mother rang up and complained several years after he was prosecuted. It was interesting – they flew me over in a helicopter without a door, with the insurance assessor. What they do is they find out where the source of the fire was – if you see a melted factory, where was the source of the fire? And they said, when they came down after the flight, “It wasn’t you.” Because the fire was right in the centre of our factory. And they said, “If you’d done it yourself, you would’ve done it at one end and then got way out of it.” But no, the young boy who lit it … after four days we suspected something had happened on that night shift. He confessed, was prosecuted, but then had no money to pay the bill. About a year later there was an arson in a pack house; similar thing, where pallets had been put in a corner and lit, and the same boy had lit the fire. The foreman came down and accused him; he took a personal grievance case, was awarded damages, even though he’d lit the fire, and he used that to pay off the Soma money he had owed from the first fire. [Murmurs & chuckles] His mother then rang me about six months later, and said that I had destroyed the family life because he and his partner were having a young baby and they’d applied for a loan to get a house in Dannevirke; and that every time he went in to get a loan he was refused because of his history. So I was accused of having destroyed this man’s future. So it’s been an interesting story which we’ve followed.

Interestingly enough with the fire, I had a fireman – we’ve got an outlet shop in Heretaunga Street; still got the same shop, and that’s what I use as the office as well. I had one of the firemen who attended the fire come in a few weeks ago, and said, “I remember the night. It was so fierce with the blow-torch that it cracked the windows on the first fire-engine that went in.” The heat. Yeah.

Question: The boy obviously didn’t get burnt?

Harold: He got out of it. It got away on him, and I don’t think he knew what was going on, but I know at the time, you know … a wonderful opening, with all the rah-rah earlier on in the year, and then six or seven months later we get arsoned and it’s all destroyed. But I mean our whole idea of consolidating was to make us more efficient, but we lost everything – our stock, our machinery – at a time when the industry was heading down the slope.

Question: How do you see the future? Do you think it might come back or will it never come back?

Harold: Today … the apparel industry always chases cheap labour. And it’s been interesting to see that after the war, Japan made a lot of clothing. Japan got too expensive, then it went to Hong Kong; then it went to China. Now China is finding that their labour costs are too high now, and it’s moving over the border into Vietnam; to Cambodia; and of course there’s Bangladesh. And there’s horror stories of some of the conditions that women are working under to manufacture this clothing. So if it chases cheap labour around the world, it’s very, very unlikely. But what’s sad here is the skill set for manufacturing has been lost – and we’re not the only ones; there’s no shoe manufacturer left in New Zealand. Furniture manufacturers are fighting now because furniture’s coming in from Asia at ridiculous prices. So there’s a whole pile of New Zealand manufacturing that built up behind walls to give us some self-sufficiency, but it is slowly being dismantled. And interestingly enough it was a Labour Government that put us on this course with Rogernomics.

Question: Is there a story behind the name ‘Beefy-T’?

Harold: No. I think what they did – you know the McDonald’s hamburger? I think what Hanes did was put in behind a t-shirt, some imaging. It’s like, the best hamburger, or the best t-shirt you can get; and it was a very gutsy t-shirt with quite a high crew neck. But it was a name that they used; but we saw huge potential in marketing it properly. And it just happened to be at the time when if you had a white t-shirt and a pair of Levi jeans – it became a fashion statement. And we couldn’t do anything wrong. It was wonderful, while it lasted. [Chuckles]

Question: The manufacture of uniforms during the war – was that just a one-off? It wasn’t underwear, it was external clothing?

Harold: Yeah, it was external clothing. I think what happened during the war, people were seconded; they got all the factories that were capable of making clothes under government contracts [cough] … made for the army. Now Soma’s claim to fame then was that we were making a lot of army shirts; I think pyjamas, and underwear.

Question: And you didn’t continue in those lines?

Harold: The factories set up in Otaki and Levin were shirt and pyjama factories, based on Viennese skills that were brought out. Yeah. And they were sold in the 1960s – I think to the McKenzie Group. And Soma started to focus on its underwear side.

Question: Can I just ask, what about these days of high technology? I’m sure Icebreaker aren’t farming out to peasant workers. And 3D production – where does that come into the scene, if at all?

Harold: There’s some very clever work being done in Auckland using intelligent fabrics where they’re actually incorporating wires in to read body temperature; some very, very high, digitally-enhanced fabrics. These are niche areas that will be developed here. And one of the claims that Jeremy Moon of Icebreaker … he’s always been the early adopter, right at the front. He has to keep moving ahead of everyone else, because he’s going to be copied. This is a huge industry for copying, as we found out. Someone has a good idea; within a few minutes, somebody – in fact, they have these fashion parades and these unique designs; there’s people there with cameras taking a photograph, and within days the same thing is being reproduced over in Asian factories. So it’s very, very hard to protect intellectual property in our sort of industry; but the high tech where there’s unique features in the fabric or in the garment, can be. I think Swazi has done very, very well with their outdoor clothing for farmers.

That’s probably a good place to wrap things up; a little look at the future. Harold, can I thank you for a most amazing story. A wonderful history, but for me, I think the business and personal resilience that you have displayed throughout your business career is absolutely amazing. And the contribution that you and Soma have made to our Hastings economy and community. All the people that you must’ve employed over the years, and that you still continue to employ, albeit in a different form and on a different scale. But just another tremendous story for us, and boy! We’ve had some great ones about Hastings businesses you know, over the past twelve months. So can I thank you sincerely for coming to talk to us this evening?

Harold: Pretty special to be invited, so thank you so much for the opportunity. We feel part of this town and we’re going to keep going. Aren’t we, Alan? [Chuckles]

Thank you.