Family has been Cansew’s common thread for 100 years

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Thread has held the Schachter family together for the past 100 years.

“Thread was around me my entire life,” says Hershie Schachter, president of Cansew, a Montreal-based supplier of threads, elastics and Velcro. “My father worked very hard at this. As kids, we used to come into the office and spend time doing menial things. It sort of got into our blood. When it comes to that, I don’t think we have blood in our veins — we have thread in our veins. It’s just part of our life.”

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The company, which has a thread factory on Chabanel St. and a dye facility in St-Michel, is celebrating its 100th anniversary this month and Schachter is proud to underline that Cansew remains a family business. It’s owned and run by him and his two cousins, brothers Mark and Jack Schachter. They’re the third generation of Schachters to helm the textile business.

Cansew was founded in 1924 by their grandfather, Aron Schachter, a Jewish immigrant from Austria who began selling buttons and later thread from the living room of his apartment on St-Urbain St., right across from Baron Byng High School. His day job was delivering beer for Frontenac Breweries.

Their grandmother, Rebecca, took the calls from the customers and the family would deliver the buttons and thread to tailors and small sewing shops in the neighbourhood. At the time, they weren’t producing the buttons and threads; they were wholesalers.

Hershie’s father, Nathan, began helping Aron as a Grade 10 student at Baron Byng, coming home after school to do some of the deliveries. He was joined a few years later by his younger brother, David, the father of Mark and Jack. Nathan was part of the first-ever graduating class at Baron Byng in 1926 — a class that included Governor General’s Award-winning poet A.M. Klein.

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The company began manufacturing thread in 1950 at a factory on Atlantic Ave., in the area that’s now called Mile Ex, near where the new Université de Montréal campus is located. Before that, the company had been headquartered in the Wilder Building on Bleury St., which is now in the heart of the Quartier des spectacles and home to a number of dance organizations. Cansew moved to its present location on Chabanel in 1968.

It’s a classic slice of Montreal history, something that could have been pulled from the pages of a Mordecai Richler novel — the tale of a Jewish immigrant family starting in the thread biz from an apartment on St-Urbain St. and eventually turning it into a successful family business.

“When immigrants would move to Canada, people came with nothing in their pockets, and they’d managed to scrape together a few bucks to buy a used sewing machine and they’d start manufacturing something,” said Jack. “One person would run it during the day and someone else, maybe one of the kids, would run it at night.”

Nathan and his brother David, who ran the business together, used to be almost next-door neighbours in Côte-St-Luc, so Hershie, Mark and Jack all grew up very close to each other.

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Hershie never really doubted he would end up in the business, hence the “thread in our veins” line. But Mark and Jack were much less sure as young men.

“I had no intentions of coming into the family business,” said Mark. “Our mother had four boys in total and our mother had different ideas. She thought all of us should be in the business. But I had no intentions. My story is I was looking for a job and doing a master’s thesis (in marketing in the MBA program at Concordia University) and they needed a fill-in for six months in Toronto. And I had worked summers for the company, so I said I’d do it for six months until they hired somebody. That was 1982 and I’m still here. I fell into it and never left. I enjoyed working with my dad.”

“I wasn’t going into this either,” said Jack. “I graduated university. I could have moved out of the province, but I didn’t do that. I had a girlfriend at the time. I was looking for work here. I didn’t find anything. So I was unemployed for a few months. So my dad said one day, I think it was a Friday: ‘Monday you’re coming to work with me.’ And like Mark, I’ve been here ever since.”

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They have an older brother, Allan, who worked for the company and is now retired, and another brother, Steven, who only lasted at Cansew for a little over a week and ended up becoming a psychologist.

Many jobs were lost in the Canadian textile sector as the manufacturing industry migrated to countries like China, Bangladesh and Mexico, but the Schachters remained adamant that they’d keep their operations in Canada.

“We’re not going to move our business out of Canada,” said Hershie.

They also never wanted to move the head office and factory out of Montreal.

“We’ve seen so many people go down the 401 and this is where we’ve always been,” said Hershie. “With our workers, we felt we had an obligation to them to keep our production here.”

The biggest challenge is that so much of the clothing trade has moved overseas. Said Jack: “When you go home, check where your clothes are made. And what you’ll find is most of what you’re wearing is not made here, yet we still manage to sell a lot of thread to the industry here in Canada. All of the companies have adapted to whatever we have to do. During COVID, there were men’s suit manufacturers manufacturing face masks.”

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In fact, Cansew did well during the pandemic, selling a huge quantity of elastics for masks, and sewing threads that went into masks, hospital gowns and PPE.

“So we shifted very quickly from one type of product to another, and back again,” said Jack. “Because we’re a smaller family-run business, we’re able to turn that ship faster than other people can. As the market was changing, we were changing with it. People needed certain products and we were there to deliver it. That’s an example of how we’ve adapted, whether it’s over the years with the changing industry, like with the arrival of the free trade agreements, or during a pandemic.”

Cansew’s offices stayed open throughout COVID, since the company qualified as an essential service.

This year has been a bit soft because of the economy, particularly the downturn in the furniture business. But Cansew has weathered many storms over the past century, and is investing to modernize its thread factory.

“There’s a lot of pride,” said Mark. “It’s a family business that’s survived this long and we’re proud of it.”

But it’s unclear whether the next generation of Schachters is ready to follow in their footsteps. Hershie’s son Leslie is in the corporate ranks, working as their marketing director, but Leslie’s brother and sister aren’t involved in the family business.

Mark’s son is a criminal lawyer working with the Toronto police department, and his daughter married a Dutch man and is living in The Hague. Jack has two daughters. One is 24, is working out west and hasn’t decided on a career path yet. His younger daughter has one more year of university.

So Jack isn’t giving up hope.

“Mark and I mentioned we didn’t plan on coming in and once we came in, we never left,” he said. “So you never know. There’s potential there.”

bkelly@postmedia.com

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