Faux Hair Shop in Camden Going Out of Business

Camden Courier-Post – November 29, 2003

Cheap Chinese labor dooms family firm

By Eileen Stilwell, Courier-Post Staff, Camden

No more polyester beards on Broadway.

No more plaited "wench wigs" for the Mummers on Broad Street.

And no more clouds of fake white hair to transform any Daddy into Santa Claus.

This week, the Novelty Hair Goods Co., a unique family business in a desolate block on Broadway, will close after 70 years.

The reason, said Alan Miller, whose grandfather started out making head coverings for Orthodox Jews to be buried in, is China, home of cheap labor and free trade.

At the same time, Miller, 51, of Cherry Hill, concedes he was so busy making a living exclusively on fake beards, wigs, moustaches and eyebrows with almost no competition, that he failed to diversify or mechanize.

The party’s over Friday.

The windowless, un-air conditioned shop will close. Miller will say goodbye to three loyal Camden women who have sat at the same Singer sewing machines for decades making "cartoon-like" hair pieces.

"I’ll miss coming here," said Barbara Krogman, 68, dashing out to catch a bus to her Fairview home. "I feel bad because we all get along here. Just goes to show you, nothing stays the same."

In its heyday, Novelty Hair Goods sold 250,000 hair pieces wholesale to costume manufacturers across the country. Last year sales dropped below 15,000.

"I may be the last domestic manufacturer of hair goods left doing any volume," said Miller, father of two teenagers and chairman of the Cherry Hill Planning Board.

In the 1960s and 1970s when Halloween was growing into a major costume holiday, 45 employees kept the factory humming two shifts a day to meet the demand.

Even then, offshore manufacturing was posing a threat, but minimum orders were so large, only very few American companies could participate. That, too, has changed in China’s drive for increased sales.

"I hung in because I believed that eventually the public would start demanding American-made goods again and we’d be fine. It was a very innocent, unsophisticated view of the world," said Miller,recalling an era when his neighborhood was dotted with banks,restaurants, movie theaters and thriving retail.

Miller has very mixed feelings about the kind of random protectionism that seems to be part of President Bush’s trade policy.

Last year, Bush imposed tariffs on imported steel in an effort to protect domestic manufacturers and some say to secure votes in post-industrial states like Pennsylvania.

Recently, the White House targeted Chinese bras as the next import to be slapped with a tariff, a move that has befuddled a number of economists.

"The announced import restraints on Chinese-made lingerie will not create one single new job in the U.S. nor will it dramatically impact our payment imbalances," said David Kotok, an economist and money manager in Vineland.

While Bush’s move has generated some novel vocabulary, like "brahaha" instead of "brouhaha over bras," it stymies Miller.

"How do you pick and choose which industry to protect? Thirty years ago,when there were broad-based tariffs and they were enforced, everybody knew the score. Today, it’s: Do I flood the market with cheap shoes, but close every shoe repair shop? Do I save the steelmakers, but put the longshoremen out of work? I’m over being angry. It just rankles me," said Miller.