Over the course of an extraordinary forty years at its helm, Brian Sharoff would steer PLMA from a relatively inconsequential group of fewer than 100 U.S. store brand manufacturers and suppliers to a thriving international trade organization with over 4,000 members on six continents, as well as organizer of two of the largest annual trade events in the world.

A son of Brooklyn shopkeepers, Brian was in his late 30s when he was recruited to lead a fledgling Private Label Manufacturers Association as president in 1981, following three terms in the New York State legislature representing his Brooklyn neighbors, and then serving as executive vice president of a metropolitan merchant association for major department stores in New York City.

Through his leadership of PLMA, Sharoff would become the face of private label worldwide, driving a transformation of retailers’ store brands into a multi-billion-dollar global industry that has altered the course of commercial history. As one retail CEOsaid recently, he became synonymous with private label success.

While merchant names had been associated with their own branded products for hundreds of years, by the mid-twentieth century, mass media advertising in the U.S. and elsewhere had given rise to national brands that dominated the marketplace. The brief appearance of unbranded “generic” products in the 1970s had given many retailers a taste of private label’s potential, but consumers’ perception of the products’ quality was largely negative.

Sharoff saw an opportunity to change the dynamics of private label by emphasizing two imperatives: higher quality and the retailers’ ownership of their brands. “If you use the word private label,” he observed, “consumers and the media would continue to ask, who makes it? But the term ‘store brands’ shifted the focus away from the manufacturer to the retailer.”

A true visionary, Sharoff saw enormous potential for store brands evolution reaching far beyond lower-price alternatives or even mere equivalents to national brands. But he also brought to the industry unique mastery of the powers of information, communication, focus, and commitment to the buyer-seller relationships essential to building the bridges between what is and what could be.

He launched original consumer and industry research that tracked changes in shoppers’ perception over time, and he commissioned third party, point of sale data that made it possible for the first time to quantify the industry’s growth. He sponsored conferences that promulgated industry-wide discussions to promote best practices in the development, marketing and merchandising of store brands. He expanded PLMA operations to Europe and beyond and organized trade missions around the world, enabling private label executives to understand store brands’ impact and marketing trends across multiple markets, languages, and cultures.

He launched groundbreaking platforms for the trade, consumers, and the press—from print, electronic and video media programs that communicate the vitality of the private label industry, to awards and recognition programs that put a spotlight on the importance of innovation.

And he introduced the industry’s first professional development programs to educate private label executives and cultivate future generations of leadership in retailing, manufacturing, and marketing of store brands—programs that after more than two decades have educated some 1,800 store brands executives, ensuring an industry legacy for decades to come.

Adding to these achievements and others too numerous to mention, Brian’s intellect, his sense of humor, his honesty, loyalty, and compassion were the stuff of legend. His is an indelible legacy that carries on through the association, the relationships he cultivated, and through countless individuals he inspired or mentored in every country and every sector of an industry that he came to personify.