90 Years Of Jaftex

As you may or may not have heard me mention, my family company, Jaftex Corp. turns 90 years old this year. Currently, we have the third and fourth generations at the helm. This is a huge feat and quite frankly, I don’t know if any Fabric Fortunoff ever anticipated this. Moreover, no one can predict how much longer we will be in business. With the fifth generation on deck though, the prospects are promising.

What I want to do in this blog post is give you a little low down of what has been going on over the last 90 years and how it all began. For starters, Jacob A. Fortunoff (JAF of Jaftex) started the Jaftex Corp. in 1930. Prior to that, he worked at a company called Rogefort (I presume Jacob was the Fort part. See the image below.). For the most part, he was a jobber and strolled the streets of New York selling seconds of all different sorts to the “entire satisfaction of many others.”

Jacob had 3 sons (Dan, Everett & Gilbert). Dan & Everett joined the business and helped to transition the business from jobbing to more manufacturing fabrics for the lingerie and sleepwear trade. Eventually their son’s, Robert (my dad and son of Everett) and Glenn (my uncle and Dan’s son) joined the business.

It was business as usual for many years until the 1980’s. Around that time, my dad decided that he was carrying the weight of the business on his shoulders and it was time for one side of the family to takeover over the entire company. As I am sure you figured out, my dad ended up with the keys to the castle which was well-deserved.

In the last two decades, my dad was first joined by my sister, Jill, then me and then my brother, Greg. As an aside, Greg had a very brief stint in the business immediately after college. In the 90 years, I would imagine that we have sold close to or over $1 billion of fabric. I would also imagine that we have had thousands of employees if not tens of thousands. We have had probably 10 or more different office spaces. Today, we even have satellite offices where we house Fabric Editions in Greenville, South Carolina and FreeSpirit Fabrics in Charlotte, North Carolina.

We had our own fabric printing facilities called Oxford Printing & Finishing and A.E. Nathan. Plants were not our strong suit so we opted for contract warehousing and closed the plants down. In hindsight, this was a great move and worked out very well for us. I recall my dad racking his brain when trying to decide the fate of the plant. There were many years where we didn’t have our own warehouse. In 2018, we had no choice but to open our own warehouse called G&S Warehouse. The current warehouse is more about the packing and shipping whereby Oxford & A.E. Nathan were more about printing, manufacturing as well as the cutting and shipping of the fabrics.

Over the years, we have had close to 20 different companies. All the companies that we currently own were purchased as opposed to created by someone with the last name Fortunoff. Below, I will list all the companies and the warehouses, and in future blogs, I will take the time to talk about what the companies did and do.

• A.E. Nathan Co., Inc.
• Andrea Knitting
• Bertenn Textiles
• Chanteclaire Fabrics
• E-D Knitting
• Fabric Editions/3 Wishes
• FreeSpirit Fabrics
• G&S Warehouse
• Henry Glass Fabrics
• Merrivale Fabrics
• Natural Fabrics
• Oxford Printing & Finishing
• Peter Pan Fabrics
• Rogefort Textiles
• R. Seril & Sons
• Stylemaker
• Studioe Fabrics
• The Blank Quilting Corp.

That’s what I got for you this week. I hope you enjoy learning about the history of the business. The last think that I want to mention is that we have events up our sleeves for both consumers and customers to celebrate the 90th anniversary in style. Stay tuned. In the meantime, feel free to use the #jaftex90 hashtag. Have a super week.

Historian Scott