Dream customer

"I will be happy to try to respond to your questions, although you should know that many details of our relationship with the President Elect are confidential.” Homi Patel, chairman and CEO (chief executive officer) of the leading American suit maker Hartmarx Corporation which has more than 3,000 union employees on its rolls, replied when Parsiana succeeded in connecting with him on e-mail. This was, of course, before Barack Obama’s tumultuous Inauguration as the 44th President of the United States of America.

This publication’s first awareness of the potential Zoroastrian connection with the White House came by way of an article in the Bombay daily DNA (December 11, 2008) which had stated that the "President elect has ordered his first tux in 15 years for his inauguration” and that Bom­bay born Patel "will personally see to it that the President elect gets what he wants.”

As Patel later recounted to Parsiana, "I first met Mr Barack Obama when he was running for the US Senate in 2004 for the State of Illinois. I was extremely impressed with him as to how articulate, smart and reasonable he sounded. We did a fundraiser for him for his campaign in our offices and developed a relationship going forward.”

Describing Obama as "very supportive of companies with union connections, particularly those that are positive and non-confrontational,” Patel added, "He felt that it would be the right thing to wear our clothes to support our company and its employees. The fact that we had developed a relationship when he was not even a US Senator certainly went a long way towards our continuing working relationship.”

US President Baraack Obama and (inset) Homi Patel

The DNA article speaks of Obama’s growing collection of suits from this121-year-old company, the largest US-based menswear maker. Patel is said to have described Obama’s two-button suit on the website for Women’s Wear Daily as "a classic power-suit…It’s strong, navy and it does make you look powerful, but what makes it presidential is the man in it.”

No doubt Homi’s parents — Roshen and Burjor R. Patel, a former chief accountant of the Central Bank of India as per DNA — would have been delighted at their son’s tryst with history had they been alive today. An alumnus of Bombay’s Cathedral and John Connon High School who graduated in economics from Bombay University before acquiring his MBA from New York’s Columbia University, the reticent Patel lives in Chicago with his wife Anne. Their two sons, Neville, 34, and Cyrus, 32, have also acquired their masters in business administration from prestigious colleges Wharton, and Kellogg-Northwestern respectively. Their 16-year-old daughter Natasha has time to catch up.

Patel migrated to the US in1972 joining Hartmarx on the managerial side in 1979. "It was very difficult in those years to get a green card,” he notes. "The Dean of the Business School at Columbia University, Prof Sam Richmond, was on the board of a clothing company. I worked as his research assistant at the school and he was responsible for getting me into this industry,” Patel responds to our query as to how he got on to a clothier company.

He tells us about the highs and lows of his career: "Obviously, the high points were the various promotions that I received which eventually got me to the position of chairman/CEO. Also, the various acquisitions that we made that enabled the company to diversify into men’s and women’s (wear) and all the different product categories.” The "terrible business conditions in 2008 that have led to banks basically stopping any lending” seem to have eclipsed any other low points he must have encountered in his 30 years in the business.

Classifying himself as a liberal Zoroastrian in religious terms, Patel says he would be more active with the community in Chicago but for the time restraints imposed by his work schedule. "There is so little time beyond work — I like to spend it with my family,” says the man who also enjoys reading. He has attended a North American Zoroastrian Congress in Chicago in part and has been a keynote speaker to a Zoroastrian business group.

"Are you perturbed that the Parsi community numbers are dwindling?” we ask him. "Yes, but some of it is because of our own orthodox philosophies regarding marriages, children, etc,” he replies. According to him "it will continue to dwindle” in the next 20 years, but he adds, "We need to measure the impact of the community, not simply in numbers, but by its impact on the world, the caliber of its members and the contributions made to improve our society.” However, there is one community trait that Patel would prefer to eliminate: "There is a general tendency among Zoroastrians overseas to squabble with each other. We should work hard to overcome that.”