Approximately six million European Jews died in World War II. Wolf Finkelman wasn’t one of them.

A native of Poland, Finkelman was a teenager when he was liberated from Gunskirchen, a subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, on May 4, 1945. A year and a half later, the 18-year-old and sole survivor of his family of nine sailed to the United States.

The Finkelmans, including family patriarch Wolf (back row, second from right), in the early '90s.

Finkelman settled in the Houston area, completed high school and found work in the clothing industry. And through fate and the will to survive, he left at least two major legacies: a family that now counts four generations, and a thriving apparel company – Scope Imports – that has been in business for over 55 years.

“He built all of this from nothing,” says his son Alan, who is the president of Scope. “When he came to the States as a teenager, he couldn’t speak English, and he didn’t have money, friends or family.”

Today, Scope is a Finkelman family affair. Alan, 62, is the president of the company and oversees the retail operations, and works alongside his brother Steven, 64, the company’s CFO. Alan’s son David, 39, runs Burnside/Sierra Pacific (asi/87224), the promotional products side of the business, while his brother Adam, 29, is the company’s VP of sourcing. (Another of Alan’s sons, Josh, operates a warehouse in California that deals primarily in apparel, while Alan and Steven’s brother Ronnie is a partner who worked for the company in the ’90s.)

“My dad built all of this from nothing. When he came to the States as a teenager, he couldn’t speak English, and he didn’t have money, friends or family.”– Alan Finkelman, Scope Imports

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When Wolf and four other partners (all Jewish families) started Scope in 1967, they made a pact that no kids would be involved in the business. But they made an exception for Alan, who started working in the warehouse and basically didn’t see his father for 3-4 years as he took on decidedly non-glamorous responsibilities such as dumpster contracts and box buying. “The only reason I came into the business was because my dad had worked so hard his whole life for me,” says Alan, “and I wanted to work hard to make his life better.”

The shared experiences of growing up in the family business stretch across the generations, from working in the warehouse to the outfits of their youth (polyester pants for Alan, Ecko Unltd. clothes for David and his brothers). So too was the lack of expectations to join the family business, even after Wolf (who died in 2010 at the age of 81) bought out his partners. And yet, the gravitational pull of the company has proven too strong. David recalls being in college and attend-ing MAGIC (the massive fashion trade show in Las Vegas) for the company, and how it dawned on him that his classmates were aspiring to something that was already part of his life. “That’s when I realized,” says David, who joined the company in 2009, “how lucky I was that my family had this business.”

Alan Finkelman (second from right) is the president of Scope Imports, the company started by his father Wolf. He's pictured here with three of his sons: David (far right) is the president of Burnside/Sierra Pacific, Adam (far left) is the company's VP of sourcing, and Josh (second from left) runs a logistics company in California.

Philosophies and values have carried through the generations. Alan says that the company’s biggest strengths are that “we’re honest and we care” – morals his father taught him, as well as the need to be consistent in your rules. From his dad, David cites the importance of hard work and treating people the way you want to be treated. It’s engendered fierce loyalty at the company, with employees typically staying 20 and even 30 years.

“I’ve never worked for a company that has this much compassion, understanding and loyalty in my time in sales,” says Paul Kory, a 33-year promo industry veteran who joined Sierra Pacific in 2014 as VP of business development. “I think that says a lot.”

Kory notes that working at Scope makes you feel like an owner of the company, and it stems from the atmosphere of trust that the family cultivates. Says David: “As much as family for me is anyone with the name Finkelman, I think anyone who works for us, especially for an extended amount of time, is also a Finkelman.”

What does the future hold for the family? Well, Alan remarried and has three teenage kids (two sons and a daughter), while David has three young daughters. And while both say they just want their kids to be happy, David also acknowledges that it would be exciting to bring in the fourth generation.

“I’m the oldest of six brothers, and it’s always been a male-dominated family business,” says David. “And I have three daughters, and I’m thinking ‘We’re in the clothing business – it should be run by women.’”