New Hanes job fits Sara Lee exec to a T.

• Author: Brown, Kathy
• Position: John Wesley Hanes - Lee Chaden

It may not have the cachet of some of the other places he has called home--Paris, Rome and Toronto--but Winston-Salem has quickly grown on Lee Chaden, who came to the Triad with his wife two years ago. "We love it down here." That move, like the others, happened because of work.

In this case, it's his job as CEO of Chicago-based Sara Lee Corp.'s Branded Apparel Division, which will be spun off by September into Hanesbrands Inc., a publicly traded Fortune 500 company with headquarters in the Twin City. It has about 44,000 employees and took in $4.7 billion in revenue last year. Sara Lee wants to concentrate on its food and beverage business.

Chaden, 64 this month, will be CEO and executive chairman. He grew up in South Bend, Ind., and graduated from Purdue University in 1964 with a bachelor's in industrial engineer-ing. He followed that with an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1966. He went to work at Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble in brand management and joined Rochester, N.Y.-based Playtex's apparel division in 1970, largely because it promised to send him to Europe as a marketing manager. He lived in Paris and Rome. By the time he left for Toronto in 1974, he was fluent in French and Italian.

In 1979, Chaden joined Westport, Conn.-based Marketing Corporation of America as a partner. He worked for MCA spinoffs and divisions until...