Click here for Part I, Part III & Part IV

When still in her 20’s, Susan J. “Suzy” Ganz walked away from a Wall Street job and took over the running of Lion Brothers Company Inc., the Owings Mills, Md., company with world leadership in the manufacturing and distribution of embroidered and appliquéd emblems.

You could say her career hung by a thread, given the perilous state of the company in the late 1980s after her father’s sudden death, the garment industry itself and the twin forces of globalization and technology. But Ganz says she fell in love with the factory floor, as much as the people working the yarns.

“You know the best period of time was spending time on the factory floor, there were about 350 people and they were some of the most knowledgeable, kindest people one can imagine and they sold me on Lion,” Ganz told citybizlist’s Edwin Warfield in an interview. “I fell in love with manufacturing and it was probably falling in love with people that did it,” she added.

Ganz, who earned her MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and worked initially for Merrill Lynch, turned around the fortunes of Lion Brothers. For her leadership, she has been inducted into Maryland’s Circle of Excellence and thrice ranked in Baltimore Business Journal’s Maryland’s Top 100 Women.

In the interview, she talks about taking operations to China and many other parts of the world, embracing new technology, and building partnerships with the Girls Scouts, NBA, NFL and Nike.

EDWIN WARFIELD: When did Lion Brothers become a global operation? Where are your global operations?

SUSAN GANZ: In the mid-1980’s, Lion developed its first presence in China and with that we opened an office in Hong Kong and it partly was because clients were looking for a lower-cost product. For us, in terms of manufacturing business, the only way to produce those products was to produce them in countries where that was accessible. We began our effort in China in the mid-80s and it was interesting. China at that time was not like China that we know it today. It was the China with no roads, it was a China where it took a couple of hours to get right over the border, it was China where the uniforms were… remember the old Chairman Mao uniforms, it was very different, they would go through your person, see whether you had any contraband such as a U.S. newspaper. So, that began the journey in China.

EDWIN WARFIELD: Can you tell us about the history of technology at Lion Brothers?

SUSAN GANZ: It began with a facility that was doing just general finishing for the embroidery and then we grew that and over time China had its own presence, it really developed over time. The growth of Lion over there was really like the growth of China itself. It went from small-scale manufacturing to large-scale manufacturing, it then went from analog to digital and today our place is as leading as one can be. We have changed out all platforms and technologies over the past 18 months and it's probably the most modern facility in terms of what it is doing as any place in the world.

EDWIN WARFIELD: Can you explain the transition from top down to bottom up manufacturing?

SUSAN GANZ: Today in the United States, we have a small-scale presence. We have about less than a hundred people here but we have very, very small-scale manufacturing. We call it a micro facility because we want people to know that how small it is in fact and for us we are happy about calling it a micro because it really reflects the future of manufacturing versus the legacy of manufacturing. If the legacy is about having, you know, sprawling buildings and lots of people and heavy capacity that is not utilized, the future is really about more modular manufacturing where one can plug and play things in a digital capacity as required.

For us, we are happy to be in a lead-certified building out in the middle of Owings Mills but we are thrilled in terms of the population that we have because they know how to operate digital equipment, they know how to work with new age equipment, as well as the legacy quality that Lion has always produced.

We also have research and development here, which works on all sorts of new innovations from material science to mechanical engineering, from new technologies in terms of adhesion to, you know, what is going to be next and then about five minutes away we have our offices where we have everything from executive offices to really the front-end functions, the customer-facing functions, the design functions and product development.

We do a lot of product development in the United States because many of our clients are large global brands who are based in the United States. In Hong Kong, we have an office and same thing it is an executive office as well as customer-facing and in China, it is large-scale manufacturing where we have multiple facilities that produce all sorts of identity, apparel identity and apparel identity systems for global brands and leading not-for-profit organizations.

So, that is generally the footprint of where we are and what we do. We work with factories. We work with brands and then we work with our trading partners all over the world. They are in countries from, you know, Indonesia to Guatemala from, you, know Jordan to, you know, the United States so it is a footprint of wherever they are we create product that is then delivered to them and what we do is we make sure that they are supported wherever they are with regard to having really great support in terms of adhesion and techniques to be able to make sure that they are processing our goods well.

Again, I think those things are just, they are core and primary, which is, we have global clients so we must be global and technology is ever-changing and so that must be core to us as well. If we look at those two elements of where we need to be because people are there and those we serve are there and we look at the other element of how do we move a business forward I cannot imagine any business that is not technology infused today. Even if it is we were talking earlier about you know some analog businesses. Any business can be as technology-driven as you want it to be, ours just happens to be right for technology.

Connect with Susan on LinkedIn

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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