William Mow(1936-) was founder of Bugle Boy, a clothing manufacture.
Shortly after he was born in Hang chow, China, his family moved to the United States. He graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1959 and then earned a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University in 1967. He worked for Litton Industries for two years before venturing out on his own. Mow founded Macrodata based on his invention of a method of testing large-scale integrated (LSI) chips and the company went public in 1973. Around 1976 Mow sold his shares and left the company due to an investigation by the SEC. Although he was later cleared, he had to stay out of the electronics design industry for a few years due to a non-competition clause he had signed with Macrodata.
In 1977, Mow founded Bugle Boy Industries. During the 1980s the company enjoyed much growth. Sales approached $1 billion, making Bugle Boy one of the largest privately owned apparel companies in the United States, but the company fell into troubled times in 2001, declared bankruptcy, and was sold that year for $68.6 million dollars.
(1936-)
Bugle Boy Industries
William Mow rose through amazing adversity, including being forced to resign from a company he owned because he was falsely accused of hiding financial information, to found the highly successful Bugle Boy Industries. Though Mow knew nothing about the clothing business when he began the company, effective advertising and networking, along with a good understanding of his target market, helped make Bugle Boy clothing a high demand item in the United States and around the world.
Personal Life
William Mow, or Mow Chao Wei, was born in Hangchow, China in 1936. His father worked at the United Nations in New York as an official of the Nationalist Chinese regime. When William was 13, his parents fled the Communist takeover of their country on “the last Pan Am flight out of Shanghai.” Once they moved to the United States, the family adopted Western names, and Mow Chao Wei became William Mow. He grew up in Great Neck, New York, where his parents owned a restaurant.
William Mow’s family valued education. Of his parents’ four sons, three earned a Ph.D. After attending a boarding school, Mow worked his way through an extremely challenging course of study in electrical engineering at the highly respected Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of New York. From 1963 to 1965, he also worked for Honeywell, Inc. He earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Purdue University in Indiana in 1967.
Mow married twice and fathered two children, one from each marriage. By 1997 several members of his family held high positions at Bugle Boy, including his wife Rosa (who supervised operations), two daughters (heading up marketing and creative arts), and two nephews. But Mow insisted that any relatives working for him either earn their pay or find other work.