Word: yarn
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...fall selling season opened this week, the biggest news among retailers is s-t-r-e-t-c-h yarn, a yarn about as elastic as rubber. Tried out for men's socks with hardly a whisper of publicity three years ago, and even opposed by many retailers, the longwearing elastic-stretch socks developed their own customers. They captured nearly 70% of the market in New York City and 25% across the nation, sent textile men scrambling to turn out dozens of new stretch-yarn products...
...both Northern and Southern knitting mills, looms are now weaving stretch yarn into men's briefs, women's girdles, T shirts, gloves, bandages, figure-tight bathing suits, swing-free golf shirts, skintight dancer's leotards, baby rompers that will grow with the infant, and long-wearing panties that will fit any girl between two and eight...
...discovery of the yarn was a fluke. During World War II Switzerland's Heberlein and Co., and France's Billion et Cie. were trying to find a way to make ersatz wool. They failed to do so, but in the process made a nylon yarn that would stretch. In the Heberlein method, fibers are twisted, and the twist is set by heat, a sort of permanent-wave process. Then the fibers are broken down into single filaments, and those with a right-hand twist are plaited with others with a left-hand twist. The result is a soft...
Instead of fighting each other, Billion and Heberlein got together, agreed to sell their yarn (trade name: Helanca) together in other countries, put profits in a joint account. But Helanca was not alone in the U.S. for long. Soon U.S. companies developed their own stretch yarns -Agilon, Ban-Lon, Chadolon, Shape-2-U, Fluflon and Superloft-and the whole industry bogged down in patent suits and licensing disputes. Burlington Industries, biggest U.S. textile company, was itself attached for patent infringement by Heberlein, and many other textile men were reluctant to invest money in any process that might soon...
Valuable Loss. Last September, attracted by a tax loss of $11 million, Sonnabend bought control of Botany Mills, an oldtime worsted manufacturer hard hit by the textile depression. To make use of its tax loss, Botany bought money-making Gastonia Combed Yarn Corp., Jewel Cotton Mills and Gurney Mfg. for $14 million. By writing its losses off against the mills' profits, the purchase was made largely an intracompany, bookkeeping operation, cost Botany little in cash...