Herbert Gallen, 92, Founded Ellen Tracy Fashion Label

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A champion merchandiser, Herbert Gallen, who died Saturday at 92, founded Ellen Tracy as a low-end blouse maker and built it into an upscale manufacturer of women’s business clothes with $200 million in annual sales.

Ellen Tracy designs became leaders in the so-called bridge apparel market of clothes, in between lower-priced labels and designer wear, which picked up momentum from the 1960s as women began entering the work force in ever increasing numbers.

The privately held company was sold to Liz Claiborne Inc., a leader in the bridge and sportswear categories, in 2003, for $180 million. Gallen was born September 15, 1915, in Paterson, N.J., the grandson of a silk mill owner and the son of a fabric manufacturer. After high school, Gallen went to work for an uncle who owned a chain of auto supply stores. He got involved in the clothing business almost by accident when, thanks to family connections during World War II, he had access to fabric that was hard to come by. He also served in the Army during the war.

In 1949, he founded Ellen Tracy, manufacturing women’s blouses in New York and selling them for $28.50 a dozen to department stores. The label had a showroom and stockroom on Third Avenue. As for the made-up name, which many customers over the years apparently took for a real woman, à la Betty Crocker, Gallen told the Washington Post, “If you had a women’s line, it had to have a women’s name.”

The company expanded in the 1950s with only rudimentary designs, concentrating mainly on blouses and dresses. In 1962, Gallen hired Linda Allard, a young designer just off a bus from Ohio who knocked at his company’s door as Gallen was in the middle of a dispute with a designer. Rising within two years to become the company’s head designer, Ms. Allard’s innovative sportswear and office wear keyed the rise of Ellen Tracy in subsequent decades.

Gallen remained the leader of the business side of the company and was known as a tough merchandiser. “We got a reputation as being strict and rough and tough about markdowns and specials deals,” Gallen told Women’s Wear

Daily in 2002. He tended to all facets of the business and could frequently be found overseeing advertising shoots, store displays, and manufacturers.

The company started manufacturing overseas and continued to expand in the 1980s, when the bridge category emerged for women who were entering higher levels of corporate America. A dress department was added in the mid-1980s, supported by advertising campaigns featuring models Carol Alt and Cindy Crawford. Licensing deals for perfume and accessories also were part of the mix as annual revenues grew to around $200 million in the 1990s.

A deal to sell the company to the Boston-based private equity firm Bain & Co. fell through at the last minute in 1995 — Gallen was already 80 and interested in selling out “for estate reasons.” He finally sold out eight years later.

Gallen’s earliest blouses had been produced under the name of a real woman, Betty Barr, his wife, who died in 1998. In 2000, he married Ms. Allard, who survives him, as do two children, seven grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren.

Gallen spent much time in recent years on his 163-foot yacht, the Mystique, plying East Coast waters from the Caribbean up to Nantucket and Maine.

He never had a problem sharing credit for his company’s success, and added Ms. Allard’s name to the label in the early 1990s to give it more of a designer feel. Recalling the early company’s early blouses in the Women’s Wear Daily interview, he said: “As long as you had the fabric, you designed them. We took prints and made blouses out of them. When we got a designer, they got pretty.”


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