Quaker Fabric Corporation

Quaker Fabric Corporation was the Fall River, Massachusetts producer of jacquard upholstery fabrics and specialty yarns that grew to become one of the largest producers of jacquard upholstery fabric in the world. The Fall River business began in 1945; Vertipile acquired Quaker Fabric in 1984, and Larry Liebenow and partners acquired it in 1989, building it into Fall River's largest private employer. Fortunes then reversed: between November 2003 and June 2007 the company shed some 1,700 jobs in Massachusetts, announced a move toward liquidation in July 2007, filed for Chapter 11 on August 20, 2007, and saw the majority of its assets — inventory, machinery, intellectual property, trademarks, patents and real estate — acquired by Gordon Brothers Group at auction that October.

Company Profile

The growth decades matter to the record: at its peak Quaker employed more than 2,000 people in Fall River and in 1998 announced a 1.3 million square foot plant expansion. Its jacquard weaving for the residential furniture industry, and the specialty yarns it sold to other fabric manufacturers, made it a supplier whose order book rose and fell with American furniture production.

The October 2006 announcement of an upholstery fabric mill in China, with partner Hangzhou Zhongwang Fabric Products Co., was the company's attempt to follow its customers offshore. It came too late to change the arithmetic: losses, borrowing constraints and the July 2007 decision to wind the business down preceded the August filing by a matter of weeks.

The range behind the name is jacquard upholstery fabrics and specialty yarns. Its customers are the residential furniture industry and other fabric manufacturers. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Quaker Fabric Corporation in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing Quaker Fabric Corporation with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

Because Quaker Fabric Corporation no longer operates independently, there is no current company website to link from the snapshot, and enquiries that would once have gone to its head office belong with the successor named in the status line — or, where the business closed entirely, the record here is the end of the trail. The dated summaries remain useful to researchers precisely because the company can no longer update its own account of itself.

For anyone researching the fashion industry's public-company era, Quaker Fabric Corporation is a useful case: Fall River's largest private employer, undone in four years by the same global forces it tried to follow to China. The summaries in this section were compiled while the story was still unfolding, which is exactly what makes them worth keeping — they preserve what the company said about itself at the time, before the outcome was known.