 As a youth, he worked at the General Merchandise Exchange, a clothing distributor, where In 1925, he started The Chester H. Roth Company, a hosiery manufacturer.In 1958, he merged his company with the Julius Kayser Company which began as a manufacturer of silk gloves and later expanded into lingerie, swimwear and hosiery.The new entity, the Kayser-Roth Corporation had sales of $56 million and by the time that Roth sold the company to Gulf & Western in 1975, sales had grown to $505 million.