Unusually, the founding of the community was not due to the gradual and spontaneous influx of Jews into the town over time, as they discovered favourable trading conditions and sufficient numbers of other Jews already established there. Instead, one of the major local cloth manufacturers of worsted and woolens, Holloway Bros. (founded 1850), decided to expand into men's clothing in the late 1870s and to specifically recruit Jewish tailors to work for them.
They recruited Jewish staff, as they had already employed them in a branch of their business in London. It may be that the Jewish expertise in mass-production and machining of clothing were the skills they were seeking, along with their exceptional tolerance of hard work and long hours. It seems that the mills brought in at least some of them to supervise clothing out-workers, as some of the master tailors listed in 1881, had up to 25 hands working for them.
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