I met textile merchant Michael Mone at a trunk show for tie designer David Hart at Bloomingdale’s on 59th Street in New York recently—the store’s first trunk show for a tie maker. We spoke about the neckwear business, which Mone sees improving lately, while the dapper Hart talked to customers and posed for photos with Japanese tourists.
Michael Mone, left, and David Hart at Bloomingdale’s during the trunk show.
Mone, who works for the neckwear textile mill Harry Bachrach Inc., believes in ties. “We’re hell-bent on neckwear,” Mone told me. “Some people might say the pie is getting smaller. We’d like to grow the pie, and historically, it’s times like these when that growth can happen.”
I met with Mone and Hart again a week later at Bachrach’s offices on 37th Street in Manhattan to continue the discussion.
When Hart started his business a couple of years ago (see my write-up on Hart’s ties from Oct. 2008) with ideas for patterns of sock monkeys, pills and 
wind-up toy robots, Harry Bachrach Inc. was up to the challenge. “We had a lot of guys coming in saying they wanted to do ties. If you don’t have ideas and vision, what are you bringing?” recalled Mone. “But David had such a great talent level. Every time he came in, he had another idea: ‘let’s do this, let’s do that.’”
“They were willing to do things that other mills wouldn’t,” added Hart as Mone laid out a fabric showing a 1930s Monaco racing scene below stripes. The weave, done in Bachrach’s English mill, was really complex, with eight or nine different colors—the kind of thing you’d expect to see as a print. It’s in stores now, including Bergdorf Goodman, for $150. That price, higher than most of his latest collection (average retail $115), is as much for the weave as it is for the cutting: “You throw away almost as much fabric as you use,” said Mone.
Hart’s fall collection, shown below, will be predominantly checks and plaids, a trend both he and Mone are bullish about. Going forward, Mone and Hart both agree that the sweet spot for better neckwear will be from $85 to $105, and Hart is aiming to reduce his retails to around $95 for his spring 2011 collection.
Harry Bachrach Inc. is all about experimentation. “We’re a custom house,” he said. “We don’t produce lines twice a year. If we feel strongly about something, we’ll make 50 patterns.”
The company, which started in America in the 1960s, was founded by Austrian immigrant Harry Bachrach. He had brought his family’s textile business to England after escaping the Nazis during WWII. From London, he moved to New York. Although Bachrach lived until 1990, he was retired by 1979.
Mone, whose brother Jamie also works for Bachrach, joined the company about 12 years ago. A hedge fund guy who studied at the London School of Economics, Mone landed in the textile business partly out of boredom. “I think it’s in my blood,” says Mone. “I work around the clock some days. I love it.”
He won’t name any of his vendor clients—besides David Hart—but says that they range from the smallest to the biggest, and from Bergdorf Goodman to JCPenney. He talks to a lot of buyers, who say that the tie business is picking up again. The narrow tie trend has had a positive impact on the younger (and mass) market. “The skinny black tie is one of the best performers,” Mone observed. “It’s a small percentage of the total, but it’s turning.”
Bachrach’s business has weathered a lot of changes in the neckwear business. In the beginning, most the mill’s manufacturing was in America (with Bachrach supplementing its American stripes with Italian jacquards from Bianchi in the 70s and 80s). The shift to Asia began in about 1995. “We’ve been ahead of the curve,” Mone said. “As a result, we have a system in place for the best quality and the best lead time.”
Bachrach invested in English weaving just before the market crashed, and the higher price points of these fabrics hindered growth. “That said, the luxury market is coming back,” Mone asserted. “We’ve been hearing it from the stores.”
In addition to the ties from his fall collection pictured here, Hart will be releasing ten more plaids, using Bachrach’s English silk/cashmere fabrics, scheduled for holiday delivery.
“We’re very comfortable being the people behind the scenes,” said Mone. “I’m a second-generation textile guy, I want to help you make your ties better. That’s it.”
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