A history of Pasold - the Ladybird Company

Almost three hundred years ago a Bohemian weaver called Johannes George Pasold established a knitting and weaving business in Fleissen, Czechoslovakia. Thanks to the creativity, marketing flair and technical innovation of successive generations of the family, Ladybird became established as a major international brand and the most loved range of children's clothing in the United Kingdom.

Legend has it that Johannes saw a ladybird in a dream, which inspired him to establish the business. What is certain is that from the earliest days the Pasold company was always at the forefront of garment technology, using the latest machinery and maufacturing techniques to knit cloth that was silky smooth, pleasing to the eye, resilient and fun to wear.

In the eighteenth century, (long before the Industrial Revolution,) Pasolds were using not only looms but also knitting machines.

Machines were acquired from far and wide. Family members and co-workers had to go to great lengths to transport such heavy items to the factory and then to get them inside the building. They had to remove windows from the upper floors and install special hoists to drag the machinery into place.

Delivery of a new machine brought the whole town to a stop, as a crowd of on-lookers built up to see the spectacle of such elaborate 'contraptions' being hauled upwards into the sky. This created a special interest in the Pasold company, and the range of garments that it made, and helped ensure a good local market for the goods.

Successive generations of the family built knowledge about machinery and manufacturing techiques, making the Pasolds engineers as well as weavers. When the machines they wanted were not commercially available, they adapted existing models to make a process of their own. The factory was highly integrated, and included strict quality controls at each stage of production. The innovations set the factory apart from its competitors and were adopted years before the approach was adopted elsewhere.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Pasold garments were famous across Europe. At the time they had chosen the brand-name 'White Bear' and a logo very similar to the one used in Britain for Fox's Glacier Mints. The Ladybird name was initially only used in Great Britain.

The firm's home base of Fleissen was located in the Sudetenland towards Czechoslovakia's border with Germany. Company bosses travelled to Prague, Vienna, Berlin, Paris and London to sell their wares. With amazing insight they noted the volatility of political life in Germany and wondered where it was all leading. They decided to diversify, choosing England for a new factory, well away from the growing unrest at home.

The Pasolds chose a green field site at Langley in Buckinghamshire (now Berkshire) and secured the necessary permissions to build a small factory. As construction work continued, they hired a local workforce and commissioned new machinery following the pattern established in Czechoslovakia.

One of the new plant's first orders came from Woolworth's, totalling 28,000 pairs of knickers in a single season. It helped Pasold to get established in the UK. The family never forgot.

In 1938 the family's fears about the state of affairs in Europe proved well-founded. Adolf Hitler's troops 'liberated' the Sudetenland. The invaders over-ran the picturesque quarter of Czechoslovakia, and applied their own ways of life and methods of business. Manufacturing, imports and exports were strictly regulated.

Observing from Britain, the Pasolds were more concerned at the way the Nazis undermined the guarantees of religious freedom that had helped to build Fleissen after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The open-minded tolerance had been a key deciding factor when the family chose to make Fleissen their headquarters. Control of the business was hastily transferred to Langley.

Taking stock in 1938, the Pasold family could count many successes. They had invented the ruderleibchen, which was destined to become a universal favourite under its English name, the 'T' Shirt. The design had originally been intended as an undergarment at the turn of the century, but had shown much more potential. New patterned, multi-colour versions (left) enjoyed spectacular results.

The second manufacturing base in the UK had quickly become established and had moved into profit. It used state-of-the-art equipment and operated the latest working practices. The family had sent a cousin to the British Dominion of Canada to build a similar facility to serve North America.

Both factories had full order books. In Langley the machines worked around the clock to knit fashion garments and underwear. The Fleissen plant, which was operated by local management under German supervision, had been assigned work making military uniforms and overalls for the Third Reich.

In Britain the business plan was to reduce dependence on chain stores, as the majority of the output from Langley was sold at F.W. Woolworth, British Home Stores, Marks and Spencer or Lewis's. Each chain sold under its own name. Pasold's salesmen were sent out to sign up a thousand independent shops for goods to be sold under the brand name Ladybird, which had first been dreamed of by Johannes George Pasold more than three hundred years earlier.

The creative team at Langley set to work to bring the Ladybird brand to life. Their work was inspired.

The human-like ('anthropomorphised') Ladybird characters, which started to appear in advertising from 1950, captured everyone's imagination. Many of the campaigns featured the spirit of the age, which included mad scientists, computers, space stations and even the newly invented zebra crossing.

By the mid 1960s Ladybird had become established as one of the most successful brands in Britain, with the Langley factory producing millions of garments every year and exporting them all over the world.

To the Pasolds' surprise, despite repeated offers, the chain stores still prefered to sell the goods under their own brand names, meaning that Ladybird products appeared under the Winfield brand name at Woolworths, Keynote at Littlewoods, St Michael and St Margaret at Marks and Spencer and Prova at British Home Stores.

To redress the balance, the Ladybird management developed a national network of independent stockists. They provided not only the merchandise but also the marketing package to help the individual stores and small chains to compete with the larger players.

This included an extensive range of shopfittings to make the displays distinctive - mainly centred around the bug characters - and an initiative to fund the majority of the cost of local newspaper advertising, so long as some brand guidelines were followed.

The specialist stores offered a wide range of quality clothes at lower prices than for other big brands, but at a distinct premium compared with the major chains of stores. The price differential meant that many ordinary families bought the clothes for 'Sunday-best' rather than everyday wear, with the casual ranges generally reserved for children in the more well-to-do families.

The Pasolds always regretted that the higher margins required by independent stores kept some of their best products out of the price-bracket of the poorer families and wished that the network could establish the same economies of scale achieved by Woolworth's.

A revolution decimated British manufacturing industry in the 1960s. Cheap-priced imported goods made in-roads into the UK market, forcing old-established firms to re-examine their costs and to increase efficiency to drive down the price to the customer. The pressure also encouraged a number of takeovers and consolidations in the industry as companies merged to cut costs.

Pasold was approached by a series of rivals asking them to act as 'white knight' in protectiong them from takeover by less desirable rivals. In the short term the new acquisitions drove big sales growth, but it also made Pasold more complicated and, by perverse logic, more vulnerable to takeover itself.

The same pressure was affecting the High Street, with a series of independent stores going out of business or joining the larger chains. Pasold's answer was to seek exclusive terms with a desirable chain, negotiating for months in 1962 to take over the Children's Clothing Department in John Lewis Department Stores and again in 1963 with the French chain Pingouin. Both options fell-through as the retailers chose rival partners.

In 1964 the Pasolds explored the possibility of merging with Coats, Paton and Baldwin, the world's largest sewing thread manufacturer, which had its headquarters in Glasgow. This looked like the ideal partnership as Coats controlled many of the raw materials that could help Ladybird to launch a new range of own-brand threads and wool. At the time Coats operated a loss-making chain of 300 Scotch Wool Shops, which it was hoped would provide a route to market. The companies merged in 1965.

Despite the best of intentions on the part of both organisations, Ladybird's uniqueness was gradually lost, driven in part by the clash of cultures between the family business house style of Ladybird and the international heavyweight management style of Coats personnel. Little by little manufacturing was moved away from the Langley factory, which did not receive the investment necessary to keep up in a rapidly changing market.

In 1984 Woolworths approached Coats Viyella to explore the possibility of securing exclusive rights to the Ladybird brand in the UK. The British store chain had recently changed hands and was keen to rebuild its reputation for quality and to expand its range of children's clothing.

Coats Viyella was prepared to entertain the idea so long as the store chain agreed to accept guidance and controls over product design and quality. Agreement was reached that Coats Viyella would help Woolworths re-engineer its business processes and would retrain the chain's buyers, in exchange for a fixed fee on every garment that carried the Ladybird logo.

The companies launched a small trial while work continued to design and source complete new ranges of fashions. The sample stores sold their try-outs virtually as soon as they went on sale, proving the potential and confirming the tie-up. A national roll-out was planned for the Spring of 1986, which is covered in a separate exhibit, here in the Original Virtual Museum.

In the year 2000, 16 years after the launch of Ladybird at Woolworths, as part of a corporate restructuring programme following a dip in their profits, Coats Viyella decided to make changes to their Contract Manufacturing and Viyella International Divisions. The Ladybird name, including the worldwide brand rights, was sold outright to Woolworths.

To complete the story, after establishing enviable market shared for Children's Clothing in the period after their demerger from Kingfisher, including the leading position in the under-five age group, the store-based Woolworths chain hit the rocks during the Credit Crunch of 2008, falling into Administration. While the Administrator, Deloitte LLC, was unable to save the High Street stores, both the Woolworths brand and Ladybird were rescued by Shop Direct in January 2009 and have since been relaunched on-line. Shop Direct continues the proud tradition, first dreamt over by Johannes George Pasold over 300 years ago, in offering a contemporary, well-made range of children's clothing at highly competitive prices via their Woolworths.co.uk website.

The Original Virtual Museum would like to thank Professor David Jenkins, Professor Pat Hudson and Dr Kaori O'Connor of the Pasold Research Foundation for their encouragement in preparing this feature.

The Ladybird and Fashion Gallery

Fashion overview (1909-2009)   Make it yourself patterns and thread   The Ladybird Legend is born

Woolworths' first Ladybird items (from the 1930s Gallery)    History of the Ladybird Company    Building fashion sales (1950-80)

Launch of Ladybird at Woolies     Kids and Celebrations In-Store     The Easter Parade

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