Wholesale: 50 years

 

David Holmes will retire this month, after more than 50 years at wholesale giant Gazal. Fraser McEwing sits down with him to discuss key turning points in his career.

“I’m definitely leaving this time,” says David Holmes, divisional manager of business shirts at Gazal Apparel, one of Australia’s biggest clothing wholesale suppliers.

He’s sung that song before, three times actually, but now there is no turning back. On 23 December he will end his association with a company which began in 1958 and in which he was taken on as only its fourth employee. Currently, the publically listed Gazal Apparel Pty Ltd employs around 1250 people who produce an annual turnover of $250 million.

Holmes’ first glimpse of founder Joe Gazal was in 1959. Gazal had been in business for a year, making drill work shirts and pyjamas which he sold to chain stores like Coles.

He’d housed his company in a tiny Redfern cottage and needed a healthy lad for the warehouse – which occupied the only two bedrooms. The opportunity suited Holmes who’d been told by his uncle to quit his job of only two weeks with D & W Murray because general softgoods warehousing had no future. He went from an ailing dinosaur to a seat-of-the-pants apparel specialist.

“Joe was a man you wanted to work for,” Holmes recalls. “He had huge amounts of energy which he translated into a work ethic, a magnetic personality and an amazing memory. He could spend hours discussing a complicated deal with prices, quantities and measurements all mixed in, and never write anything down. Months or even years later he could recall it with absolute accuracy. In the early days he didn’t spend much time in the office. He drove a blue Ford Zephyr in which he picked up stock from the factories and delivered it to our retail customers. Between times he made sales calls and bought fabric.”

In the 1950s and 60s all Gazal’s garments were made in Australia, meaning that production had to be controlled from head office in Sydney. Holmes’ understanding of the warehouse and its products led him naturally into production management and with that at his back he progressed easily into a suburban sales role.  

Looking through the other end of the telescope at his 50 years with Gazal, Holmes has done almost every management job one man could do in a clothing company. That was probably the main reason he stayed put when others might have sought new challenges with other companies or gone out on their own. “Every few years I’d virtually start a new job,” he says, “except it was for the same company.”

Only once did Holmes actually get away from Gazal and that was to try his hand at farming – to fulfil a long held ambition. He bought a farm in Coonamble in NSW and grew wheat and cattle. It lasted two years until his funding arrangements went sour and he had to sell up and come back to town.

“I called Joe to see if he had anything he wanted me to do and he said ‘yes, we’ve got a home wares division that we just can’t make work and I want you to shut it down with a minimum of loss.”

Administering company euthanasia went against Holmes’ kindly personality but he gritted his teeth, moved the employees on and wound up the business. No sooner was that done when Gazal bought Lovable, a leading force in women’s foundation garments and underwear. Holmes found himself running it. That job lasted from 1988 to 1992.

Although Gazal had tried mightily to nurture Australian clothing production, it was obvious that imports would eventually run it down as governments on both side of politics moved to free up trade by progressively removing import protection. Gazal’s first imported garments came in the form of babywear from Japan in 1969. By the early 70s Taiwan had become the country of choice as a clothing producer and Holmes spent a ‘Spartan’ year in Taipei setting up supply lines for Gazal. Mainland China then grabbed the spotlight, and Holmes moved there between 1992 and 1994 to once again secure factory contacts and quality control for the company.

“The building boom had just begun in Shanghai,” Holmes recalls.  “The place was being transformed. It was an exciting time to be there.”

Holmes was part of the team that worked through a fundamental change to the company’s marketing strategy in 1993. With imports deregulated and de-mystified, volume retailers were developing their own import programs and were moving away from reliance on suppliers like Gazal for their house brands or unbranded merchandise.

Although Gazal tried to streamline its Australian production – many of its local suppliers were members of Joe’s broader family – it was forced out of home-grown shirts in 1988, pyjamas in 1991 and Lovable bras and underwear in 1998.

Under the managing directorship of Joe Gazal’s eldest son, Michael, the company then made a bold move to market only its own brands. Some of these, such as Calvin Klein and Van Heusen were made under licence but most of the brands had either been developed or acquired by Gazal.

Holmes was initially uncomfortable about moving away from the massive unbranded business that had built Gazal but he soon realised that without publically acknowledged brands the company’s importance to its retail customers would rapidly diminish.

At that point, Gazal reinvented itself as a brand management company, recasting its structure into seven wholesale marketing divisions covering some 17 brands.  A separate division, under the directorship of Richard Gazal, Joe’s youngest son, now looks after three retail groups: Brands Unlimited, Trade Secrets and Calvin Klein underwear.

Holmes will leave behind the last eight years of managing four business shirt brands: Van Heusen, Trent Nathan, Paramount and Bracks. His replacement will be Rupert Maisenbacher, a long term member of the Gazal management team.

At 67, and used to the demands and adrenalin of merchandising some of Australia’s leading shirt brands, Holmes is not ready to pretend that there is nothing better to do than play golf – although he does intend to be seen a little more often on the course. If you’ve ever bought a frozen, home cooked curry from an exclusive retail freezer, you’ve probably contributed to the Holmes’ household. 

David’s wife Pamela has cooked and sold curries for more than 20 years. She operates from a small shop in the harbourside suburb of Mosman and distributes her products throughout New South Wales. If Holmes’ taste for business and curries persists after Gazal, he’ll put some of his abundant energy into expanding Kitchen Curries. But don’t be surprised if a special curry eater’s shirt suddenly appears in the window of the shop.

Although big companies like to boast about image and power, their greatest assets are people like David Holmes who quietly apply their considerable skills to originating and bringing the goods to market.