C.M. Almy and Sons, among the Episcopal Church’s best-known vestment making and church goods companies, has been acquired by F.C. Ziegler, America’s largest manufacturer of church supplies. The November 1 announcement of the transfer of ownership comes only after a few months after Wippell and Co., a U.K. vestments firm with a broad reach into the Episcopal market, gave notice of its pending closure.
F.C. Ziegler is a Roman Catholic-focused firm based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Its president, William Zitter, told TLC, “We are committed to the Almy customers. The Almy brand will stay as an independent brand, with an independent website and catalog. I don’t see us making a bunch of changes.”
“I am convinced that we were the best option for the Episcopal market to continue to bring the brand as it was before, while continuing to elevate it,” he explained.
Almy’s production center will remain in Pittsfield, Maine (F.C. Ziegler recently purchased the building as a sign of its commitment), and all Almy employees will be retained. Zitter said that they have hired five new sewers since the acquisition — “and we would hire five more, if we could find them,” he added.
The two business transitions, industry veteran Trevor Floyd says, are bellwethers of wider trends in the church goods industry, which has seen widespread consolidation and a shift to cheaper, mass-produced merchandise, as churches have shrunk and expert needleworkers have become nearly impossible to find.
“I don’t know any young people who are starting out in this line of business,” Floyd admitted. “I always said to the guys at Almy’s that we are the last of the breed.
“It’s not a dying industry. There has been contraction and people buying each other out, but there will always be a market for quality.”
He added, “If you would have told me 10 years ago that Wippell’s would be completely closed and I would be one of a few Episcopal supply houses left, I never would have believed it. I thought Almy’s would be buying out someone else.”
Almy & Ziegler: Two Family Legacies
Clarence M. Almy, a native New Yorker, opened his tailor shop in the city in 1892, at age 19. He specialized in clerical tailoring and claimed to have been trained by one of Britian’s most highly respected tradesmen. His son, James Ayer Almy, later joined his father in the business, taking charge of it after C.M. Almy’s untimely death in 1927.
James later sold it to a relative, Donald M. Fendler, who found success marketing chaplains’ kits during World War II. He eventually moved the business out of the city, setting up a small workshop in Pittsfield, Maine, which remains Almy’s main center of production.
Fendler focused the business on mail-order sales, but he and his son and grandsons also operated storefronts in several locations in Connecticut and suburban New York. The latest catalog says that the current store, in Armonk, New York, will be open until at least December 31. Zitter said the plan to close the store predated Ziegler’s purchase of the company.
For more than half of its history, Almy only manufactured and sold cloth goods. In the April 2, 1941, issue of The Living Church, C.M. Almy, then operating on Fifth Avenue in New York, advertised itself as a seller of “cassocks, surplices, clerical suits, choir robes, and Altar linens.” The same issue contained advertisements from 28 other sellers of church goods, most of them long-closed family businesses.
About 50 years ago, Almy branched out into metalware, and began producing vestments, just as a dramatic shrinkage in religious communities shifted most fine embroidery work from convents to commercial producers.
In the 1980s, Almy acquired Mary Moore Linens, which had been contracting for years with embroiderers on the Portuguese island of Madeira. A recent catalog notes additional partnerships with two Spanish metalworking firms to produce chalices, patens, and other liturgical items.
An article at Down East, a local Maine magazine, noted changing trends in Almy’s business. Do-it-yourself choir robe kits, it said, were big seller in the 1950s and ’60s. Almy claims to have introduced the cassock-alb, a convenient, and now common — if somewhat controversial — clerical gown to the American market in the 1960s. Almy now trades in traditional Gothic and more fully cut contemporary chasubles and broad stoles, generally using simple designs and machine embroidery. Almy also takes pride in its Clericool collars, neckwear in light and breathable plastic, and plastic candles with refillable chambers — “the last Paschal candle you will have to buy.”
Almy’s tendency to aim for the middle of the market in price and style earned it the nickname of “French for ‘Methodist’” among snarky Anglo-Catholics decades ago. But in the Down East article, as well as a 2006 TLC interview, Almy’s executives said half its business was with Episcopal churches and clergy.
Almy’s new owner, F.C. Ziegler, is also a family business, but had a different focus for much of its life. Frank Charles Ziegler was a Roman Catholic jeweler who opened his shop in Tulsa in 1929. During World War II, he began producing chalices and other liturgical items for local Catholic priests. The business gradually expanded (as did the Catholic Church in the South and Southwest).
About 50 years ago, Ziegler began opening retail stores, and currently has eight stores and a delivery service across 19 states in the Mid-Atlantic, South, and Southwest. Zitter says it is the nation’s second-largest church goods company in terms of market share, and “far and away the largest manufacturing company.”
The firm’s founder died in 1993, and Zitter is married to F.C.’s great-grandaughter, Samantha. Nine of the company’s 119 employees are family members. While Ziegler continues to manufacture its own metalwork, its 500-page catalog shows that it markets products of numerous North American and European firms.
“Almy has very strong brand recognition,” Zitter said. “Now we can put Almy in front of our other customers, and bring our metalware and other products into their market.”
Almy is the latest in a series of nine acquisitions that F.C. Ziegler has made in the last 10 years, and its first foray into cloth goods. “We are committed to producing high-quality items made in the U.S.A. If you look at our trends, the one thing we have never done is to cheapen our brand.”
The Catholic slant of its market is also clear, with its homepage featuring ornate gilded tabernacles, saintly medals, and Polish Christmas wafers.
Zitter says 85 to 90 percent of his customers are Roman Catholic, but Episcopalians have the next-largest share of the client base. Plus, he notes, “I think Almy probably had more Catholic business than you would have expected. About a third of their business was Catholic already.”
Supply Chains and Changing Tastes
“Since COVID the whole industry has changed,” Floyd said. “A lot of manufacturers have closed up shop and gone away. I deal with major delays on delivery of fabric and metalwork, and shipping has gotten incredibly expensive. If I import a good quality cotton lining from the U.K., I pay as much in shipping as I do for the fabric.”
Floyd said that he continues to source most of his fine fabrics from England. “I’ve worked with this same weaver for 40 years. Even though the cost of the materials and the duties and the shipping is expensive, it’s quality.” He said that many other companies are opting for cloth produced in China and Vietnam instead, a cost-cutting shift he is determined to resist.
Another issue is finding people who sew. “All of the big U.K. houses are really worried about finding sewers,” he said.
“Hand embroidery is a grave concern. You cannot find people who are trained to do it. In the old days, they’d make the nuns do it, but now you need to pay someone a living wage.” Floyd said he only knows of two skilled hand embroiderers in the U.K. that still work predominantly in the church market.
Floyd said that within his overwhelmingly Anglican and Episcopal client base, “We’ve been noticing people coming back to a more traditional look for a while. … I’ve sold more fiddleback [chasubles] in the last five years than I probably sold in 20 years at Wippell’s.”
He admits, though, that his clients are not the norm, adding, “What I’ve seen in the market, and specifically in the Catholic market, is that they will buy a lot of low-cost vestments, use them for a few years, and then throw them away. ‘It’s only $200,’ [they say]. ‘Who cares? I’ll just buy another.’ A church will pay a huge amount of money for a marble altar and put a nylon altar cloth on it. The true appreciation of quality is lost with the new generation coming up that have been brought up in a throwaway society.”
Zitter acknowledges the same problems, but says that he hopes his company can be part of the solution. “I’m 43 years old. I’m looking at a church market that is seeing a decline, but I want to invest in that market so cheap products of lesser quality from overseas won’t be the only option. Our strategy is to strengthen our offerings. We want to make sure there will always be beautiful items available for reverent worship.”
