Alexander City, AL, once the site of as many as 7,000 jobs in the textile industry, will see the last 200 manufacturing jobs disappear starting Jul. 29 at a facility there that had laid off 200 persons only in January. A distribution center that employs 400 persons in the area will remain open. In a letter to employees, Russell said the “competitiveness of the apparel market makes for a very difficult business environment and requires that we constantly seek ways to improve our competitiveness.”
Russell once dominated Alex City, as it was known, as few companies had since the days of Lowell, MA. Under family control for generations since its founding in 1902, Russell built a massive vertical textile operation that had everything from yarn spinning, knitting, dyeing, finishing and cut-make-trim in the area. It even owned forests to fuel its power generation. The last patriarch of the family, Eugene Gwaltney, was known as one of the shrewdest buyers of textile equipment, always one step ahead of the competition and making Russell the leader in its field.
Everyone in town believed that they could graduate from high school and have a job for life in one of Russell’s mills. That was true for a few generations but started to change in the mid-1990s when Russell succumbed to the competitive pressures of the apparel business and started a series of layoffs that culminated in this most recent news. Along the way, it tried to turn itself into a more diversified sporting goods brand with acquisitions of Brooks Running and Spalding’s team business under then CEO Jack Ward. That failed too and the company was swallowed by Berkshire-Hathaway’s Fruit of the Loom in 2006 where it resides now.
Written by Nicolas Yang
