Singer: The Downfall of a Great American Manufacturer

Over the past two months, six readers have written in about sewing machines. I have never once mentioned sewing machines in this newsletter. All the complaints arrived independently, through the tip line.

I must admit that I am not a sewist. The extent of my capability is limited to ugly patches and button repairs, so I was hesitant to investigate the category at all. But given the sheer number and conformity of the reader messages, I knew there must be an interesting story here.

The general shape of all of the complaints is that Singer is riding on a reputation it earned a long time ago. Readers describe machines that are now plastic, sealed, and generally not worth repairing.

Several found that brands they assumed were competitors turn out to have the same owner. One reader bought a new Singer that broke in under a year. They also bought a Singer from the ‘50s, for a fraction of the price, that still runs.

The pattern is one we’ve covered many times before. A market that most buyers cannot navigate, where reputations carry little meaning and honest information is hard to come by.

What makes this investigation worth your time, whether or not you sew, is how effectively it demonstrates what happens when a reputation stops being something a company protects and instead becomes something it extracts.

What follows is the story of a once-great American company. I’ll also cover who actually makes the machines you see for sale, and what I’m planning on buying.

Singer’s decline is often told as a private equity story. That isn’t really true. The financiers arrived in 1988, eight years after Singer announced the end of American household machine production. The true story starts 30 years before any Wall Street suits showed up.

Between 1951 and 1957, Singer’s share of the American market fell from about two-thirds to about a third. Japan built 134,000 machines in 1947 and more than a million by 1951. Its makers were aiming at America almost from the start. Brother's own history records an executive, Masayoshi Yasui, arriving in the United States in 1950 to assess the market.

Japanese machines used a multicam zigzag mechanism that enabled users to swing the needle sideways to complete a zigzag stitch.

By 1959, Japanese imports accounted for 22.6% of US sales of multicam zigzag machines, against Singer's 61.4%.

We know exactly how Singer decided they’d handle this new Japanese competition because the United States sued over their approach and the Supreme Court quoted sections of Singer’s internal mail over the course of the lawsuit.

Singer wanted a patent broad enough to cover the Japanese machines. It did not have one. Its own application was stuck in a Patent Office dispute with the Swiss firm Gegauf. Gegauf's application carried a priority date nine days earlier. Singer realized that if this dispute was fought to a finish, one side would lose outright and the winner's patent claims would be narrowed. A narrow patent could not be used to block anyone’s imports.

So Singer stopped fighting its rivals and recruited them. It cross-licensed with the Italian maker Vigorelli, royalty-free and worldwide, after Singer’s President had threatened to litigate Vigorelli's patents into invalidity. Then it settled with Gegauf, and the two agreed to help each other get claims "as broad as possible."

M.L. Waterman, a Singer VP, wrote to Singer’s president on 13 April 1956 explaining why an agreement with Gegauf was worth having:

Three weeks later, Singer’s patent attorney wrote to his own department expressing his optimism about how Gegauf was being handled.

Ultimately, Gegauf sold Singer the American patent application for a meager $90,000.

In January 1959, Singer petitioned the US Tariff Commission to have the President exclude every imported machine covered by that patent, naming Japanese and European makers alike. In that filing Singer put its own minimum price at $300 and said the Japanese machines sold for an average of $100 less, "often far below that figure."

The filing went in under Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930. That provision lets the Commission order Customs to stop infringing imports at the border.

Singer won at trial. In May 1962, Chief Judge Ryan found that "Singer's sole interest was to protect its '401' machine against all infringing machines."

In 1963, the Supreme Court reversed him and held the whole arrangement an unlawful conspiracy.

The patent system is, in my view, a wonderful thing. It exists to reward a company or individual for building something better. Singer coopted the patent system to keep someone else’s better thing out of the country and out of the hands of consumers. They then asked the government to seal the borders behind it.

At Singer, legalism replaced innovation as their primary competitive strategy.

Singer was a century old by 1956, but the family legacy was already long-gone. No member of the founding Singer or Clark families had run the company since Edward Clark died in 1882. What followed was professional management of the purest form.

The two men with the greatest impact on the company had no manufacturing or textiles background at all.

Donald Kircher was a lawyer that Singer hired in 1948 to look after its legal affairs. Kircher became President of the company in 1958 and immediately went on a spending spree. He bought 22 manufacturing companies, in audio, aerospace, defense electronics and calculators. Sewing fell from about 90% of revenue to about 35%. In 1963 the company dropped "Manufacturing" from its name, to better reflect the nature of its business. By 1974, the company owed $1.1 billion.

Kircher was replaced the following year by Joseph Flavin, a finance executive from Xerox, who wrote off $411 million of the losers.

Singer’s 1977 annual report described their sewing business as experiencing “dramatic growth”, representing an “excellent opportunity”.

Despite the optimism, their 1978 report outlined a new plan for their Clydebank manufacturing facility that would cut the labor force by almost half and make the plant "a cost-effective operation" again.

On 12 October 1979 Singer announced that it had been forced to close Clydebank and was establishing a $130 million reserve. The plant had been built in 1882 as the largest sewing machine factory in the world, and it shut the following June.

On 6 October 1980 Singer announced the end of household sewing machine production at Elizabeth, New Jersey. UPI reported it the same day:

The same story notes that Singer "is the sole remaining American maker of consumer household sewing machines and has been since about 1950." Elizabeth’s closure in 1982 marked the end of the entire American sewing machine manufacturing industry.

The rest happened quickly. Paul Bilzerian took the company over in 1988 and, between July and October, sold eight of Singer's twelve divisions for about $2 billion. He was then convicted in 1989 for securities fraud in other companies' takeovers, not for anything to do with Singer.

The sewing division and the name then passed to a Hong Kong conglomerate, which put it into Chapter 11 in September 1999. Forbes counted $23 million in cash against $1.25 billion of liabilities, and 18,000 employees were "left to wonder what would become of them."

Kohlberg bought the sewing business and the Singer trademark in 2004 for total consideration of $145 million, merged it with Husqvarna Viking and Pfaff in 2006, and sold to Ares in 2018. Ares sold to Platinum Equity in 2021.

There was no US factory on the asset book in any of those transactions. American production had been over for twenty-two years by the time Kohlberg wrote its cheque. What changed hands was a trademark, a dealer network and 80% brand recognition. The machines behind the name were already being built in Brazil and China to whatever spec the margin-target allowed.

Since then the Husqvarna factory in Sweden made its last machine on 18 May 2010 and production moved to Shanghai. The Swedish company now employs 58 people, doing design. The Husqvarna Viking page still says the brand "still designs high-quality sewing machines in Sweden" [my emphasis].

In 2022 the group's EBITDA fell 76%, Platinum put in $50 million of its own money as notes paying 20%, and Moody's cut the rating to Caa2 on leverage above 13 times earnings.

Singer's own history page runs 1851, 1855, 1858, 1865, 1870, 1889, 1890, 1921, 1929, 1933, the war years, 1951, 1952, 1975, 1978, 1985, and then 2001. There is obviously nothing good to speak of in those gaps.

Singer is the clearest case, but it is not the only one. If you go looking for a sewing machine today you will meet about eleven names. The reasonable assumption is that each belongs to a company that designs and builds the machine with its name on the front.

That is true of five of them.

Janome, Brother, Juki and Bernina design and build their own machines. The first three are independent and publicly listed in Tokyo. Bernina is private and family-owned, and in February 2026 it decided to move assembly of its flagship 990 and part of its mechanical production from Steckborn, Switzerland to its plant in Thailand, starting in May. Development, prototyping and spare parts stay in Switzerland.

Singer, Husqvarna Viking and Pfaff are one company. All three belong to SVP Worldwide. An American brand, a Swedish one and a German one, sold as three separate heritages, with an effective price ladder running between them (this reminds me of Tempur Sealy’s strategy in the mattress world). Dean Brindle, SVP's CMO, explained to Forbes in 2022:

The three brand sites all run on singer.com. SVP does build its own machines. The plants are in Brazil, Vietnam and China, and Shanghai is the most advanced of them. None of them are in America, Sweden or Germany.

Baby Lock, Kenmore and Necchi have no factory behind them at all. Baby Lock builds nothing themselves. Below about $300 its machines are made by Janome, above about $500 by Brother, and its sergers by Suzuki Machinery in Yamagata. Kenmore never built anything either. Sears contracted the work out, to White until 1958 and then to Japanese makers, and the 385-series machines were Janome's until Sears ended the relationship in 2013. Elna is a Janome subsidiary. Necchi is an Italian name now held by a Singapore company, distributed in America from a town in Texas, with no factory disclosed anywhere.

You would assume a story like that ends with people paying more for less. That is not strictly true.

Sears sold three Kenmores in 1956. The basic 58 at $89.95, the aluminum 71 in the middle at $134.95, and at the top the 84, a zigzag machine, at $239.95. Median family income that year was $4,800. So the middle machine took 2.8% of a year's income, about a week and a half of earnings. The top one took 5%, about two and a half weeks.

Median family income in 2025 was $110,500. Brother's cheapest machine, the GX37, is $149.99 and sews zigzag with a one-step buttonhole, which is what the top-of-the-line Kenmore did. That is 0.14% of a year's income, about half a day. Match the middle of the range instead and the 70-stitch CS7000X at $279.99 is 0.25% against the 71's 2.8%, a factor of eleven.

Put it the other way round. A week and a half of a 2026 family's income is about $3,190. That is what an ordinary 1956 sewing machine purchase is worth now, and it buys a genuinely superb machine.

Good machines do still exist. The Juki TL-2010Q, the Janome HD9, the Janome MC6700. None of them are cheap, but they never were.

I am not the person to tell you which machine sews best, so this section leans on experts who work with them for a living. Cale Schoenberg is a technician at his family's dealership, in Walnut Creek, California. He sells machines as well as repairing them. His newsletter is the best I found on this subject - I highly recommend it.

If you want a modern machine with all the features, the key factor is construction. Schoenberg describes a machine worth owning as one where "all the critical components of the machine are attached to a one-piece all-metal housing." On the cheap ones, he writes, "all the internal components are screwed in with self-tapping screws to the back cover of the machine, which is simply a one-piece plastic cover." The plastic shell is the structure, so when it flexes the needle bar moves with it and the stitch goes wrong.

On brands, technicians put Janome first for electronic reliability and Brother first for ease of use. Schoenberg writes that "it is rare to see electronic issues on any of these machines, but it is the most rare to see such issues with Janome." A Brother NS80e is $699. A Janome Skyline S3 is $1,199.

If you want something stout, Cale’s checklist for genuinely heavy duty is metal housing, a strong motor, a long enough take-up stroke, a vertical hook, a flatbed and a powder-coated frame. The machines that pass are old in design and mostly do one thing. A Juki TL-2010Q is straight stitch only, aluminum die-cast, 25 pounds, 1,500 stitches a minute, and he prices it at $1,099. A Janome HD9 does 1,600 stitches a minute in an all-metal cast aluminum body, $1,599 at his shop against a $1,999 list. Neither has a screen. At the cheap end he names a $200 Janome MyStyle 100 as a machine that passes the housing test.

One warning. The published price is often not the price. Dealers advertise at a manufacturer's minimum and sell below it in the shop, which is why a dealer's own site will tell you that a machine listed without an add-to-cart button is in-store only. Call and ask.

What I'm actually going to buy is an old one. Restoration shops start at $125 for a full service, and a serviced Singer 201-2, 301 or 15-91 generally runs a few hundred dollars. A full tune-up on a seventy-year-old Singer 221 is $99 at a shop in Wisconsin that charges a $159 minimum on a modern Husqvarna Viking. Singer published Adjuster's Manuals, full factory service documentation, and ISMACS hosts them free. There is a public directory of technicians at Sewing Doc Academy.

I want to learn to sew properly, and I would rather learn on something I can also take apart and fix myself.

Singer spent fifty years competing on everything except the sewing machine itself. What is left of the company is a hundred and seventy years of goodwill, and a business that consists only of spending it.

If you have a modern machine you are genuinely happy with, put the make and model in the comments or the community thread. I’ll build out the list and add a section in The Ledger.

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