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Upfront with the Berzacks

Thanks to my long-time friends and colleagues Mel Berzack, Dan Berzack, Kevin Berzack, and to my new friend Eric Berzack for their invaluable help in putting this ‘UpFront with the Berzacks’ feature together. Dave Gardner, Editor/Publisher
Around the year 1901 Mr. Meyer ‘Berzaakes’ moved from Lithuania to England where his name must have sounded like ‘BERZACK’ to the Englishmen. Thus Berzack became his new family name. There Meyer fell in love with and married Rebecca Gordon around 1907-1908. Rebecca was a buttonhole maker (hand sewing buttonholes on garments). Meyer and Rebecca had five sons: Max, Louis, Joe, Maurice (Morry), and a little later, Harris (Harry). They lived in a basement and three-story house and in the back was a workshop where Meyer, a furniture maker, started his business. A signboard erected outside the house read: “M. BERZACK & SONS, FURNITURE MANUFACTURER”.
In 1924, Rebecca became very ill and entered a London Hospital and had back surgery. She remained in the hospital for five months. Because of the surgery, she was always in pain, especially in cold weather. Doctors suggested that she should move to a warmer climate. They chose South Africa because they had several relatives there.
In 1925, Rebecca’s sister Mary emigrated to South Africa, and her son Max, at the age of 15 had just left school, it was decided that he should accompany them.
The Berzacks landed on the shores of Cape Town, South Africa in 1926 having sailed from Southampton, England. After landing they boarded a train bound for Johannesburg.
There Meyer set up his small furniture-making shop. The brothers started finding jobs in the garment industry and in areas somehow related to this industry, which was, in the main, being run by members of the local Jewish community. Berzack Bros. Ltd. was formed in Johannesburg in 1931, and then Morry formed the Harrison Sewing Machine Co. in 1932. Harrison started offering repair services to factories, importing needles and knives, selling second-hand machines, and doing small electrical repairs. However, Harrison eventually closed.
1935 – the ‘Year of Great Decision’Morry got the idea to import second-hand domestic sewing machines and discussed his plans with brothers Max and Joe. During his first overseas buying trip to London, he arranged for the distribution of Columbia Blindstitch, Bogod Spares, Simplex Cutting Machine, and Hugs Tip Tables. Morry’s brother Louis joined the company.
After getting married in 1937, Morry decided to go overseas on his and Rebecca‘s honeymoon. His first stroke of luck after arriving in England was landing the agency for Willcox & Gibbs. Morry then left for the U.S. and met with Sam Redlich of Consolidated Sewing. They became great friends. With Sam’s help, he landed the agency for New York Pressing and Wolf Machine. In Philadelphia, he tied up the agency for Soabar Shade ticketing machines.
The war years between 1940 and 1945 were the making of their business. They had good times and difficult periods. Imports were difficult for them but also for their competitors. So, with a large stock of used machinery and the expertise to repair and recondition machinery, they had plenty of business.
In January 1945, on another of Morry’s trips to the U.S., Sam Redlich of Consolidated introduced him to Wade Stevenson of Eastman Machine. With Sam’s help, Morry landed the Eastman agency.
The head office of Berzack Brothers was in Johannesburg where a large multi-storey building had been built by the five brothers. Taken around 1950, this photo shows the brothers in Maurice’s ground-floor office. From left-right: Oldest brother Max who ran the Cape Town branch; Maurice (seated); Harry who lived in Bulawayo; Joe, also from Cape Town; and Louis, who ran the Durban branch.
In 1950-51 Berzack Bros. (Holdings) Limited was floated. Morry took over all the Berzack Bros. Interests. The Company was granted a Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) listing. In the early 1980s, it was ranked #2 in the top 100 South African companies. In 1955, on the death of Mr. N. Krook of Universal Sewing, Morry and Cyril Krook arranged the transfer of the Union Special agency to the Berzack Bros. after which Morry terminated the agency with Willcox & Gibbs.
The first mention of the Berzack Bros. Ltd. as Southern Rhodesia and South Africa agencies for Union Special appeared in the December issue of 'The Needle's Eye'.
The Needle's Eye - December 1955
At the 1956 Rand Easter Show in Johannesburg, Dell Wright, Assistant Manager of Export Division (right) and Maurice Berzack, Managing Director of Berzack Brothers Limited, Union Special distributor in the Union of South Africa, inspect machine exhibit.
The next spectacular development in the history of the Berzacks occurred in 1958 in England where Eastman and Berzack together bought out Eastman’s partner in the Eastman London company and formed a 50/50 partnership. Alec Berzack relocated to England to run the operation. During the following years, they acquired various additional agencies. The most important turned out to be Juki.
On March 30, 1963, there was an announcement on the news that the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland would be broken up to form three separate countries – Nyasaland (soon to become Malawi), Northern Rhodesia (soon to become Zambia), and Southern Rhodesia, to be called Rhodesia and much later in 1980 to become Zimbabwe.
Circa 1962 – The factory in Bulawayo prospered and was the only sewing machine manufacturing company in the Southern Hemisphere.
Eric Berzack, the second-born son of Mr. Harris Berzack took the above photo around 1962 to show the different stages of how the Harrison sewing machines were made. The first stage shows a special ‘ingot’ of what was called ‘pig iron’ and these ingots were melted in the foundry, at an extremely high temperature, then poured into special sand molds to produce the base and upper arm of the machine. The metal is called ‘cast iron’. The two main components of the machine (upper arm and lower base) came into the ‘machine shop’. After many operations to cut, drill, tap and prepare the two components they were ready to be joined together with bolts – as can be seen in the third stage. This was all very precise, and each process had to be perfectly accurate to be able to fit more than 100 parts in the final assembly. This machine body was then cleaned by sandblasting and taken to the painting department. Here an amazing process of applying more than six different coats of paint was applied. After each coat, the machine was baked in an oven and then rubbed down manually with special sandpaper to make it smooth and ready for the next coat. Finally, the gold transfers were manually applied all over the machine including the name – ‘HARRISON’ as in Harrrison Street in Johannesburg where the first premises for Berzack Brothers was located. The machines were then taken to the assembly department where the parts were fitted and made to move properly and of course to be able to finally be tested with thread and material to be sure they could sew properly. Most did not have motors fitted and were used with a handle to turn the machine manually, as can be seen in the last stage in the picture. They were then packed in a special wood carry case as can be seen behind the completed machine. They could be fitted to a treadle stand which they also made and some of the treadle parts can be seen behind the machine parts.
The machine shop where all the preparatiopn was completed on the raw castings, such as milling, drilling, and tapping of the many holes.
The completed machines were tested and placed in special wooden cases for dispatching to customers.
‘Jack of All Trades – Master of None’
In his book ‘Jack of All Trades – Master of None’ Eric Berzack remembers that his father Harris (Harry) was one of the five brothers who were born in London, England. Harry was the youngest of the five and his brother Morry was the second youngest. Eric grew up knowing that all five brothers worked in the same business – Berzack Brothers – and that it had started around 1932. He also knew that Morry was the ‘founder’ of the business and although the second youngest of the five brothers, he was the one who was mostly in control of the business with the head office being his office in Johannesburg.
Each of the other brothers controlled their own offices in the regions where they lived — Max in Cape Town, Louis in Durban, Joe in Cape Town, Morry in Johannesburg, and Harry in Bulawayo, Rhodesia. The five brothers had fifteen children of which eleven were boys. All eleven were taken into the business at different times, some after school and college.
Soon after relocating to Southern Rhodesia in 1945, Harry, at age 24, set up a small, very basic manufacturing unit in an attempt to produce a small domestic household sewing machine. Berzack Bros. (Rhod.) was established as a separate Rhodesian company in Bulawayo which was the major apparel manufacturing center. Harry was very inexperienced and had almost no engineering expertise and certainly no qualifications. He knew that the first machines based on the style of the Singer 15K were very poor quality, and he gave them the name ‘Berbro’ as a shortened version of the name Berzack Brothers. He even tried changing the shape of the arm from the round Singer shape to more of a hexagonal shape. Still, there was not much improvement in the quality. Demand from the local population was poor. He stopped trying to be different from the popular Singer shape and made the improved machine with the same style Singer shape. After he managed to produce a more saleable machine he called this new model ‘Harrison’ after what is believed to be the street in Johannesburg where the Berzack Brothers had their first shop. The company grew over the years to supply – in addition to second-hand industrial sewing machines – to also sell needles and cutting machine blades. In Bulawayo, the Berzacks manufactured the Harrison household sewing machines. These were used mostly as manual sewing machines in that they were fitted into a wooden base and cover, and they had a handle that when turned by hand made the machine work. The machine had over 100 working parts that were fitted into the cast iron body of the machine. All work done to the castings had to be extremely accurate so that all the parts would fit correctly, and the machine would stitch correctly. The style of this machine was based on the original Singer 15K model. Many of these machines were being exported to South Africa. They had improved the production of the Harrison machines but needed additional products. They decided to build garment steam pressing machines and fusing machines that were needed by the garment industry.
Union Special representative Carl Heitkotter (right) on his visit to Berzack Bros. in Bulawayo, Rhodesia with Harris Berzack in 1965.
Around 1977 a supplier from the US who had been dealing with Berzacks for many years had contacted the Johannesburg office to advise them that there was a small business for sale in North Carolina. It was owned by a man – Mr. John Fox – who was now over 80 and who wanted to sell. His company sold the same cloth cutting machines that the Berzacks had sold for many years in Southern Africa, so they knew the product and the business well. Soon a deal was done, and the business was purchased by the Southern Africa family members that worked in the company. A Move to the USA The job of running this new business in the USA was offered to Mel Berzack in Bulawayo as it was known he had a wife and young baby (Daniel). As Mel was a Rhodesian Army reservist, it was becoming very difficult and dangerous for him to stay in Rhodesia. Mel accepted and in 1977 he and his family made the move to Charlotte, North Carolina. John E. Fox, Inc. represented Eastman, C.R.A., and Phillocraft. Mel renamed the company to ‘The Fox Company’ and transitioned it to sewing equipment and other product lines. In 1983 Harry Leopold Berzack (known as HL among the Berzack brothers) moved to Charlotte to set up a finance company for overseeing the Berzack South Africa foreign purchases. In 1985 Mel left The Fox Company and formed Creative Cutting in partnership with Eastman and others. Creative Cutting evolved into Eastman Cutting Room Sales. Mel purchased the assets of Eastman Cutting Room Sales in 2002 and formed SPEC (Sewn Products Equipment Company) in Jefferson, Georgia. SPEC is a worldwide distributor of cutting and material handling solutions and equipment. After retiring as a US Marine Corps F/A-18 Pilot and Operations Director, Mel’s son Daniel (Dan) joined the firm in 2013. Ahearn Denning (Los Angeles, California) merged with SPEC in 2017 to form SPEC|Ahearn Denning. Ahearn Denning is a full-line distribution company for apparel, textile, soft goods, and allied industries. They specialize in material handling, spreading, cutting, sewing, fusing, finishing, and packaging equipment, parts, and supplies. Mel retired and Dan became president of SPEC|Ahearn Denning in January 2019. Harry L. (HL), son of Maurice (Morry) Berzack, passed away on October 30, 2021. His son Kevin and daughter Nicole (Nicky) Berzack Keylin assumed the reins of The Fox Company.
Eric Transitions to Embroidery Eric received a phone call from the head office of Berzack Brothers in Johannesburg that turned out to be a life-changing event for him. His cousin, Harry L., had taken on the responsibility to introduce a new range of machinery from Japan. The product was a Tajima industrial electronic embroidery machine. After accompanying Harry to Japan the customer in Johannesburg ordered a machine with 12 heads. This was not a totally new concept but what was very new was that the machine was fully electronic compared to the older models being completely mechanical. Because Eric was the ‘technical member of the family agreed to go to Tajima in Nagoya for training. When he entered the embroidery arena after his first training at Tajima, there were only around 15 embroidery factories in all of Southern Africa. These factories had not purchased equipment from Berzack Brothers so he had to work extremely hard to convince the owners of these companies to change from the brands they had been using for many years. He eventually persuaded most that not only was his machine better, but more importantly he could offer far superior after-sales support. He added a computerized design digitizing software program that he found in Sydney, Australia. They became distributors for this software around 1986 when the PC was in its infancy and at a time when very few people knew what a PC was or how to operate it. The operating system was MS-DOS and after having to teach himself how to load the software into the PC with 6-inch floppy disks, Eric had to teach himself how to work the program that allowed designs to be converted from a simple digital JPG file into a special embroidery design file with the thousands of stitch points that the machine could recognize. These embroidery designs could then be loaded into the memory of the embroidery machine. He had to teach clients who purchased this software, how to use it. As the industry grew over the years with many smaller and even home-operated companies offering embroidery to the industry, they saw their market share grow to almost 80% or more and most of the opposition eventually closed. After Eric left Berzacks and started his own company EMTECH (Embroidery Technology) supplying a different machine from South Korea, he managed to convince many embroiderers to switch from Tajima to this new brand called SWF. The industry grew in South Africa to over 500 large and small companies. In addition, they spread their marketing mostly via their website to many other countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Eric visited most of these countries to sell machines as well as train people and service machines. His assistant who helped so much over the years was Raymond Dhladhla. Raymond was a genius when it came to repairing machines and he traveled extensively all-around South Africa and Africa to assist their many customers. Eric took him to the SWF factory in Korea one year and he even told the people in the factory how to make some improvements to their machines. They made him an award at one time as one of the finest technicians on their machines in the world. Tajima (Japan) remains a strong company and still maintained a strong market share and EMTECH was proud as a small company together with SWF (Korea) to eventually take over the largest market share from Berzacks and become market leaders in this industry. FINALLY, the Berzack group was sold in 1997 with no third-generation family members working in any of the many companies. The company was huge at the time it was sold but had it remained a simple Berzack Brothers business of selling industrial clothing machinery to the garment industry, it might have remained a very small and insignificant company without the purchase of huge cable manufacturing and electric wholesaling companies.
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