Broad Stripes, Bright Stars
They saw action during the Mexican-American War and have graced every presidential inauguration since Zachary Taylor’s. They accompanied Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession from Washington to Illinois, and made the first American expeditions to the North and South poles. They stood with the U.S. Olympic team when it won hockey gold at Lake Placid and rallied the nation in the aftermath of 9/11.
They are the U.S. flags of Annin & Co., the oldest and largest manufacturer of Old Glory, and a six-generation family tradition whose fortunes have tracked the nation’s triumphs and tragedies for nearly 170 years.
“An Annin flag was flown at a lot of important points in American history,” says Carter Beard, company president and one of two executives who trace their family roots to Annin’s founders. “There’s a sense of pride in that.”
“You are so attached to history that you feel like you are part of America,” adds Sandy Van Lieu, executive vice president and Beard’s second cousin.
Immigrant history Annin began making flags when the United States was a just four decades old. Alexander Annin set up a chandlery in New York City in the 1820s, where he sold his handmade flags along with rope, varnish and other ship supplies. His 13- and 15-year-old sons Benjamin and Edward joined the business in 1847, and decided to specialize in U.S. flags, Beard says.
By the 1860s, the U.S. Signal Corps purchased all of its flags from Annin, and before the Civil War ended, every Union brigade and battleship flew the company’s stars and stripes. Annin sold 1.5 million flags during the war.
The addition of motorized sewing machines to Annin’s workshop toward the end of the 1860s revolutionized flag making. A seamstress could sew a flag in an hour instead of a day. That was followed by the introduction of even better sewing machines in 1906 that could simultaneously stitch stars on both sides of a U.S. flag.
Today, Annin’s high-tech plant in Cobbs Creek, Va., embroiders white stars on blue fields around the clock, seven days a week, to keep up with demand from the company’s flag factories in South Boston, Va., and Coshocton, Ohio. Yet the essential elements of crafting U.S. flags haven’t changed: people at sewing machines joining red stripes with white stripes and a blue field of white stars.
“I’m sure the big issues my great-grandfather wrestled with in the 1920s and ’30s are the same issues Sandy and I wrestle with today,” Beard says. They include hiring good people, finding top-quality materials, making a great product and selling it at a fair but profitable price.
Legion alliance An Annin flag artist named Digby Chandler attended The American Legion’s first national convention in Minneapolis in 1919, establishing enduring ties between the flag maker and the veterans service organization. A plaque in the entryway at the Legion’s national headquarters in Indianapolis memorializes Chandler’s close ties to the organization, and the Legion still relies on Annin for U.S. flags and Legion flags alike.
“It just makes sense to align Annin Flags with The American Legion,” Van Lieu says. “It’s good to work with an organization that believes in the same things we believe in.”
Annin also has a colorful place in American letters. James Thurber published a short story in 1950 about a man who shops for his wife’s Christmas present in Annin’s New York City showroom, long since closed.
There have been missteps as well. Annin was one of 20 flag companies charged with wartime price gouging in 1917. “It was a mistake Annin would not repeat,” according to a company history published in 2013. During the Depression, two embezzling employees almost ruined Annin. “The company declared bankruptcy on the brink of closure in 1936,” Beard says.
Flag demand also rises and falls with the national mood. “During Vietnam, you couldn’t give a flag away,” Van Lieu says. Yet the 1976 bicentennial sparked a surge in demand, as did 9/11. Annin made and sold more U.S. flags from 2001 to 2003 than at any other point in the company’s 168-year history.
Both events coincided with significant changes and challenges at Annin. In 1975, it purchased Colonial Flag Co. in Coshocton, Ohio. “They were struggling,” Beard says. “We needed the capacity for the bicentennial.”
But it took a few years to work out all the kinks with Annin’s purchase of its largest competitor, Dettra Flag Co., in 1998. Then in 2001, Annin renovated a former glove manufacturing plant in Coshocton to allow it to expand production. The timing seemed awful.
“We were set to move the fall of 2001, when Sept. 11 happened,” Beard says. The company had to decide whether to divert resources to relocating the Ohio factory at a time when it couldn’t keep up with demand. After some deliberation, Annin moved Thanksgiving weekend 2001, a fortuitous decision that enabled it to triple production.
Throughout its history, Annin has prided itself on making U.S. flags with American materials. After 9/11, however, U.S. flag factories were overwhelmed and some stores imported foreign-made flags to satisfy demand. That prompted Annin and other manufacturers, including Valley Forge Flag Co. and Chicago Flag, to form the Flag Manufacturers Association of America. “We’re all going to be Coke and Pepsi,” Van Lieu says. “But we have things in common: the label that says ‘Made in America.’” The organization also offers a college scholarship each year to the high school senior who submits the most compelling video about what the flag means to him or her.
Foreign-made U.S. flags, meanwhile, bombed with American shoppers after 9/11. “Those flags just sat on the shelves after people saw they were made in China,” says Dale Coots, Annin’s marketing manager.
Coots became the company’s first female salesperson in 1984 and is typical of a loyal workforce of people who stay for their entire career. “You are always treated with respect,” Coots explains. “You aren’t just making can openers. You are involved with a product that has meaning to people.”
That’s equally true at Annin headquarters in Roseland, N.J., where Coots works, as it is on the manufacturing line in Coshocton, where Jackie Darr has made flags for more than 35 years. Darr started at the Coshocton plant in 1980 “for a little Christmas money,” she says, while overseeing an order of 6,000 U.S. flags for one of Annin’s large retail customers. “I guess I’m still working for a little Christmas money.”
Changes in the past 35 years have been dramatic. The Coshocton plant has gone from 25 employees to 147. A good day’s production has gone from 500 flags to 25,000, making Coshocton the single largest U.S.-flag factory in the United States. This plant also makes golf flags, state flags and the POW flag. But U.S. flags constitute more than 95 percent of what’s made here.
“It feels like you are doing something for your country,” Darr says. “My dad was a Korean War veteran, and my uncle was a Vietnam veteran. I’m doing my part making the flag.”
Darr carries that pride and patriotism wherever she goes. She’s even been known to stop and knock on doors when she sees a worn-out flag on display at someone’s house.
“I hate to look at a flag that is torn and tattered,” she says.
Sixth generation Beyond its storied legacy – making the flag that flew at Iwo Jima, being part of the Apollo mission to the moon and countless other iconic moments – one of the most remarkable things about Annin is that it has remained a family business for six generations.
“That’s very unusual,” says James Schrager, clinical professor of entrepreneurship and strategy at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Only a small percentage of family enterprises survive three generations. There are two key challenges: are the family members who want to run the business capable of taking the helm? And are the other family members willing to leave their inheritance invested in the company, or do they want to be cashed out?
There’s also the “founder’s DNA” problem, Schrager says. “The founder knows so much about the business, has made so many mistakes, has had so much good luck, has had so much bad luck that he has almost unlimited information.” Founders are almost universally reluctant to share all they know. Even if they are willing to divulge their hard-earned knowledge, that breadth of information is impossible to pass on. Beyond that, markets change, manufacturing changes, distribution changes, and a successful CEO has to adapt to conditions the founder may never have anticipated.
Part of the Annin advantage is the relative consistency of the U.S. flag.
“This product serves a fabulous purpose today that is essentially the same purpose it served in 1776,” Schrager says. “Great changes make it harder to find the next CEO.”
Part of Annin’s secret may also be Beard’s and Van Lieu’s instincts. Neither started their professional careers at Annin, which is standard advice every savvy family business consultant gives. “Don’t start at Dad’s business,” Schrager says. “That’s because wisdom comes from failure. It’s prettier if you do your belly flops when the family isn’t watching.”
Van Lieu worked as a file clerk at Annin while she was in high school. After college, she struck a deal with her father, Jack Dennis – then Annin’s vice president of sales. She would get 10 years of outside experience and then come back to the family enterprise. She found work as a personnel recruiter for U.S. Testing’s nuclear power plants to be miserable, however, and came to Annin more quickly than anticipated. Van Lieu then earned her master’s degree in manufacturing management from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, learning how to take apart a sewing machine, make clothes and lay out a factory. These skills helped Annin revamp its approach to flag making and improve production.
Beard, meanwhile, never wanted to work at Annin. He was working at Putnam Mutual Funds in Boston when his father, Lee Beard – then Annin’s vice president for operations – asked him to spend a weekend at the company’s Bloomfield, N.J., plant to help the Secret Service. Then-Vice President George H.W. Bush had planned a campaign stop at the factory. By the following Monday, Lee offered Beard a job, and it stuck.
“I started as a sewing machine mechanic,” Beard says. “Once I got on the plant floor, it just appealed to me. I’m still the happiest when I’m on the production floor.”
How has Annin remained in the family for six generations? “Our people care a lot about quality and care a lot about each other,” Van Lieu says. Annin also has moved more of the flag making process in-house. “We’re investing more in technology than anybody else in the industry, dyeing our own fabric, doing our own embroidery. We’ve gone vertical when everybody else is outsourcing.”
Beard credits the family philosophy for keeping Annin thriving. “Maybe it’s because those who came before didn’t look at it as theirs to sell,” he says, “but as theirs to take care of.”
Will there be a seventh-generation Annin heir at the helm? Van Lieu’s stepchildren and nephews haven’t yet expressed an interest. It’s too soon to say what Beard’s 11-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter will decide. He’s hopeful, but careful.
“I don’t want to put pressure on my two children,” he says. “I never had pressure to work here.” He pauses, assesses his modest office and adds, “My son will say, ‘Daddy, after I get done being quarterback for the Giants, can I be president of Annin?’ And I say, ‘Maybe.’”
Ken Olsen is a frequent contributor to The American Legion Magazine.