Doom and Gloom

ISMACS News
April 1991
Issue 31

FOLLOWING the American Civil War and the stock-market panic of 1873, all was doom and gloom in the sewing-machine trade across the Atlantic.

In the days before the market crash there was money aplenty in the States. And, with machines costing around $60 a piece, the successful pioneers made fortunes.

But post panic, the whole economy changed. For all but a chosen few, money was tight and the trade papers of the time were full of announcements of firms going under.

But one correspondent was more optimistic. He reasoned that the population was growing, tens of thousands of new homes were being built and each one would need a sewing machine. Pianos, he argued, were simply luxuries, but a sewing machine was an absolute necessity.

He advocated that manufactures should cut down on expenses but not be drawn into the trap of producing cheap, unreliable machines, which would quickly destroy reputations. The glory days were gone he insisted, but there was still a good living to be made.

And he prophesied that 50 years from the date of the article (1880) the sewing machine would have changed as much as it had in the previous 30 years.

'In days to come, the future generations will think of us as infants. Sewing machines are in their infancy. The future of our trade wis never better', he concluded.

Well, he was certainly right about the future of the industry, but was the sewing machine of 1930 really that different to 1880?

Seems to me that the really dramatic advances were the universal adoption of small electric motors, the cam-driven embroidery machines and then the computer-aided models.

And how about that contention that every home needed a sewing machine? I'm sure it was true then, but I'm guessing that the present batch of newly weds have no got, nor will ever get, a sewing machine.

Could be I'm wrong - and I'm user our trade members will be quick to tell me - but looking around a local sewing-machine agency, I got the impression that the big manufacturers had all but given up on the young market and, instead, were concentrating on producing too-clever-by-half, multi-function models aimed at getting the middle-age-plus market to trade up.

But what of tomorrow?

~ Graham Forsdyke