Putting a spin on the yarn business; Macfield tries to get a leg up on its competition.

• Author: Donsky, Martin
• Position: Cover Story

Get a load of that Mactex girl ! With her tousled auburn mop, earrings as long as your arm, bangle bracelets fit for a Norseman and a sequined, see-through blouse, she could easily be death of many a gawking construction worker.

And those l-e-e-e-gs. (Yes, they're that long.)

But it's not the legs they were peddling on all those billboards plastered around downtown Charlotte or out at the airport in April. It's what encases those legs: hosiery yarn produced by a faster, more-efficient technology that could cut costs by up to 20 percent.

New technology alone is not a big deal. Modernize or die has been the byword in the textile industry for more than a decade. What's striking is that the boys behind the Mactex girl are making such a big deal about the way it combines nylon and spandex, the two principal fibers in sheer hosiery, using a little sex (what better modern American marketing tool?) to enhance its role as industry leader and gain market share.

The Mactex girl is a creature of Madison-based Macfield Inc., a textile-industry giant and a leading producer of yarns for pantyhose, socks, outerwear, upholstery and industrial products. With yearly revenues of close to $500 million, Macfield employs about 3,500 workers in five plants in North Carolina. It is the state's fifth-largest privately held company, according to BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA's annual survey.

But until a few months ago, Macfield was content to spin its yarns quietly, comfortable in its role as an anonymous middleman, secure in the knowledge that about six of every 10 pairs of sheer hosiery sold in the United States were knitted from Macfield yarn.

No more. Nobody will give the precise amount, but this spring Macfield launched a six-figure promotional campaign - spending more on advertising than in its entire 20-year history - to make its yarn a household name, or at least a known commodity among knitters and retailers. The campaign was centered around a shapely New York model with, naturally, a great pair of gams.

Those legs did most of the talking in a series of advertisements that covered billboards and were published in trade journals this spring. Only a few choice phrases were needed to fashion the image. "Macfield introduces the future of the leg business," one ad declared.

The future, as Macfield sees it, revolves around technology that uses compressed air to mesh nylon and spandex into hosiery yarn, in just one step. Other machines require two, sometimes three, mechanized processes to tug spandex through a tube as nylon is pulled around it.

Air-jet technology, as it is called, is fast. It can spin up to 500 meters of yarn a minute, compared with 20 meters the old way, cutting energy costs and turnaround time.

Macfield isn't the only yarn producer using air-jet technology. Its competitors have followed suit, using similar equipment from the same manufacturers.

But Macfield's executives decided, for the first time in their corporate life, to kick up their heels. They christened their yarn Mactex and hired a Greensboro advertising and public-relations firm to tout their product.

"We wanted to differentiate our yarn from generic air-covered yarns," explains W.J. "Billy" Armfield IV, Macfield's co-founder.

That, he points out, is what Du Pont has done with Lycra, its brand of spandex, the synthetic, elastic fiber that gives hose, socks and other garments their stretch. But in Macfield's particular niche of the textile industry, the handful of manufacturers have relied on quality, service and price to peddle their yarns. "In our business, the generic words, textured nylon and covered spandex, have always been used," says Watts Carr, president of Macfield's ladies' hosiery-yarn division.

Forget that.

Macfield's public-relations counselors, Alfred Hamilton and Jim Middleton, partners in Hege, Middleton & Neal, sparkle as they muse about the possibilities of Mactex. What Kleenex is to tissue, what Xerox is to photocopying - perhaps that's what Mactex could become to covered yarn.

They built a campaign that used the Mactex girl - a New York model who goes by the name of Micaela - to illustrate the evolution of hosiery in the 20th century. Five period shots were done - Micaela as a flapper of the '20s, an Army WAC of the '40s, a hippie of the '60s (bare legs for her, unfortunately), a career woman of the '80s and a high-stepping, hot-pants-clad woman of the '90s.

Carr doesn't figure for a minute that Macfield's largest customer, Sara Lee Hosiery, or the dozens of other hosiery knitters that buy from Macfield will be swayed by...