Founders
On July 5, 1970 Peter Damon Schwartz and Milt Sender shook hands on a partnership that produced Daymon Associates, Inc. in New York City, with the goal of maximizing the market potential of Private Brand products, which in 1970, were rarely marketed to attract consumers, suggest quality or differentiate one retailer from another. The company name was a take on Peter’s middle name, and the partnership formed the basis of one of the largest Private Brand companies in the world, which today has offices in over 200 offices in 24 countries around the globe.
Daymon Worldwide’s co-founder, Peter Damon Schwartz, was renowned for wanting to turn each business challenge “on its side” to find new solutions. Peter recognized that there was an opportunity to “professionalize” the Private Brand business; to help the retailer reach its goals and objectives while at the same time fulfilling the needs of the supplier community. The Daymon concept of dedicating a team of people to individual customers in specific markets, and of representing suppliers only to that customer, rather than to the entire market, was designed to create focus, dedication and collaboration between the supplier and the retailer—so that they could work in a common direction to build their own quality brand.
Peter had ideas almost 40 years ago that changed the landscape of the Private Brand business, and arguably led to the changing of the entire domestic landscape of branding strategies in the retail grocery channel. As a family of companies, Daymon Worldwide continues to foster an environment that promotes the same entrepreneurial spirit that Peter lived by, freely encouraging the development of individual ideas that just may change the landscape of today and tomorrow. His powerful legacy guides all of us in business and many of us in life.
In 1994, following a courageous four-year battle with a very rare form of cancer, Peter Schwartz passed away shortly after the partners’ last collective business deal, which secured a new headquarters for Daymon Associates in Stamford, Connecticut—its current location.
Milton Sender was born in 1943, on a dairy farm outside of Erie, Pennsylvania, the only child of German/Jewish Holocaust survivors.
In 1965, he went to work for Staff Supermarket Associates, then in Great Neck, NY, first as an Administrative
Assistant to the President, and then as Director of Private Label Perishables Procurement. Staff was a buying cooperative of 18 supermarket chains
including the retailers Hannaford, Wegmans, Schnucks, Bruno’s, and companies that now make up parts of larger supermarket organizations such as Stop & Shop and Safeway.
In 1968, Sender joined the Kroger Company in Cincinnati, OH as an assistant to the Executive Vice President. He worked on one of the first computerized sales forecasting programs utilizing demographic sales data. He also was part of a team that was charged with the development of a plan to build the first “slow moving common item warehouse” in the U.S. geared toward relieving the expansionary pressure from Kroger’s 26 divisional warehouses.
On July 5, 1970, Milton Sender joined forces with Peter D. Schwartz to form Daymon Associates Incorporated, in New York City. Daymon became the first private label broker to sell products from all different segments of the supermarket industry to just one retailer in a market area, helping that retailer on behalf of the suppliers that Daymon represented to develop a singular vision of their private brand across all departments of the store. Daymon places their offices inside the offices of their retail customers, staffed with a highly skilled and specialized teams of people to provide their manufacturers with true working representation at all levels of the customer – from the creation of the product, to the marketing, merchandising, planogramming, store operations, pricing, and category analysis. Schwartz and Sender started with 3 customers in New York and New England in an industry where private label accounted for less than 4% of store sales. That partnership has grown to become one of the largest private brand companies in the World, and one of the most successful ESOPs in the country with thousands of employee owners in over 200 locations around the world, in more than two dozen countries, achieving private brand penetrations averaging over 20% globally, and up to 40% in some of its best and most mature customers.
Daymon has evolved from a broker of private labels to a company which “Builds Brands with our Partners”, and does so through traditional brokerage, through traditional packaging design, through innovative marketing and merchandising with retail service merchandisers for both national brand and private brand products. Daymon Worldwide also houses the largest demonstration company in the world, a mystery shopping organization, an events planning division, and a marketing research group that supports a global consumer e-panel.
Today, Sender serves as Chairman of Daymon Worldwide, and is active in a number of industry organization initiatives.