MY GRANDFATHER’S PAJAMAS

By Andrew Meyer

Dec 01, 2023

This is a story about my grandfather Harry Berger. Harry is universally credited with inventing the first women's pajamas. I say “invented” because in the 1920’s he was granted patents by the U.S. government for the designs of the garments (see below).In those days and even now, patents for clothing designs are very hard to get.

Harry was born in 1889 and came from a family of shirtmakers in Austria. He arrived in Manhattan in the 1920s and opened the Harry Berger Shirt company on Madison Ave. His shirts were made for men only and were famous for unique collars and exotic threads from all over the world. Harry and his wife Madeline (who he said he met on a blind date at the beginning of the Boardwalk in Atlantic City and proposed to her by the time they got to the end of the Boardwalk) traveled around the world looking for international designs and one-of-a-kind threads. The New York Times (see below) ran a story about Harry traveling all over Europe, New Zealand, Australia and Asia looking for new ideas and threads for his shirts.

Eventually everyone in my family worked for the Harry Berger Shirt Company, now called Kaylon. My father was the head of sales and my mother was the copywriter who created all the ads. Everything was going smoothly until my mother started hearing complaints from the women about the men wearing these glorious pajamas. The women wanted to know why the men had such high quality, uniquely designed pajamas and they were walking around in their plain old fashioned negligees. So my mother had a “chat'' with my grandfather...

And that’s how TOMMIES was born.

As you can see from the attached images, the Tommies brand has Asian, South American, and European influences. The brand was an immediate hit. My mother sold Tommies in ads as a “man-tailored pajama”. Now the women would look just as good as their men at night. Harry Berger used innovative marketing techniques to make sure his product was well made and a garment that would last the test of time. The New York Times ran a story (see below) about the use of “sleep testers” for the Tommies' pajamas. My grandfather would send his pajamas to women around the country to sample and test his pajamas before they were sold in the marketplace. Harry believed that you couldn’t properly test a pajama in a factory. It had to be in people’s homes and used by actual customers. The women would get a free pair of pajamas and Harry would get the feedback he needed to keep improving his product.

On his 70th birthday, Harry Berger sold his company and all of his patents and intellectual property rights to a public company named Chadbourn Gotham(see below) for what was estimated to be five million dollars.

The first thing Chadbourn did was fire my grandfather and my parents. But that’s another story...

Enjoy My Grandfather’s Pajamas.

Andrew Harry Meyer