The fixer: it's a key job in all mills. How Joe Gorga does it in his could help save an industry. He mends and melds parts of Burlington Industries and Cone Mills to find ways American textiles can keep up--and running.

• Author: Roush, Chris
• Position: FEATURE - International Textile Group Inc. - Interview - Biography

When Joe Gorga was growing up in Paterson, N.J., his father managed a plant that supplied fabric to clothing makers in New York City's garment district. The boy started work there at 13, sweeping floors. Later, he began delivering samples to customers and watched fickle buyers reject cloth that looked fine to his untrained eye. Back at the plant, his father often confirmed his judgment, but, even so, sent him back to the city with a new bolt and a different outlook.

"It was the customer's perspective that counted," he says. "It was that mindset: Do what you promised, make a quality product, and get it there on time. It's kind of simple and corny, but it stays with you."

As president and chief executive of Greensboro-based International Textile Group Inc., formed last July by the merger of Burlington Industries and Cone Mills, Gorga is trying to apply his father's old-fashioned wisdom to a 21st-century problem: How can domestic textile makers survive as low-cost competitors in Asia and other foreign countries flood the United States with cheap imports? What can be done to save the textile industry, once the state's largest employer, from slouching toward oblivion?

About 5,000 Tar Heel jobs--ITG employs more than 7,000 worldwide--depend on Gorga. What's more, a thriving ITG would show the world that domestic companies can compete against manufacturers in places such as China, where wages are 5% of what they are in North Carolina. Not everyone believes it's possible, at least not under the old model. "Are they going to survive here in the old form, or are they going to survive in a form where they have some mills here and some overseas?" asks Robert Connolly, a professor of finance and economics at UNC Chapel Hill's Kenan-Flagler Business School. "I believe the latter is eminently possible. The former is extremely unlikely."

Gorga, 52, has opened plants and created joint ventures abroad. Even so, he insists that at least a few North Carolina mills can remain part of ITG as the company develops new products and promotes its brands in a bid to recapture lost customers. It might even scoop up a few more U.S. factories.

"I think that Gorga is on the right track," said Lanty L. Smith, a former Burlington Industries president and the chairman of Precision Fabrics Group, also based in Greensboro. "He's looking to see where he has competitive advantage, and he's looking to accomplish additional consolidation."

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Burlington Industries and Cone Mills have been storied names in North Carolina commerce. Burlington was founded in 1923 in the city whose name it bears after the local...