Howard Phillips, the individual who kept the notebook, was the merchandising manager of the Ernst Kern Department Store in Detroit, Michigan when he attended the 1930 Amos Parrish Fashion Merchandising Clinic in New York. He eventually lost his position during the Great Depression and moved his family to Columbus, Ohio where he continued working in the sales promotion departments at several department stores.

Amos Parrish was a charismatic retail sales and advertising manager who founded an eponymous consulting firm in the 1920s. Amos Parrish and Company, Inc., based in New York City, promised to provide clients with scientifically-based retail merchandising analysis. The company concentrated primarily on fashion retailing and held merchandising clinics in New York attended by hundreds of retail executives from across the United States. The clinics were discontinued in 1956.

Amos Parrish and Company, Inc. also published pamphlets, charts, books, and other materials that forecast fashion trends. An army of experts employed by the company predicted consumer preferences in advertising and apparel. Fashion and business journalists often relied upon Parrish for his quotable pronouncements. Over the decades, Amos Parrish and Company absorbed other consulting firms until it was merged into Seklemian & North. Amos Parrish left the company he founded in 1961.

Sources:

Leach, William. "Brokers in the new corporate, industrial order." In Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World, by William R. Taylor (ed.), 102-103. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. The New York Times. May 29, 1925; September 1, 1959; August 15, 1961.