He's like a schoolboy sharing a secret about how women reveal to him who they are, how they feel and what they want to wear. Ribkoff is celebrating 50 years in the Canadian fashion industry and not surprisingly the company that bears his name has a slogan that reflects this intimate knowledge.

"No one knows me like Joseph," is found on everything from the Montreal-based company's delivery trucks to T-shirts and promotional material.

The company's clothing is aimed at active or professional women aged 35 and over and bears a "Made in Canada" label.

Almost all of the clothing is designed, sewn and produced in Montreal at Ribkoff's huge state-of-the-art complex, avoiding offshore outsourcing and giving him control over quality.

The privately held company, which started in 1957, sells such clothes as dresses, suits, pants and tops in more than 20 countries around the world.

He has 250 employees at his Montreal complex that houses everyone from sewers, designers and production staff to customer service representatives, marketing and accounting personnel. Another 200 employees are elsewhere in Canada, Europe and the United States.

The 71-year-old loves to meet his customers and said the slogan, "No one knows me like Joseph" comes from meeting several different women and hearing intimate details of their lives.

He revels in telling the story of a customer he met in Toronto several years ago.

It turns out the woman had given up tickets to see Chippendale dancers to meet him at a Toronto shop selling Ribkoff clothes. She initially floored Ribkoff with her declarations but he found himself agreeing with her.

"She says, 'You know my body,"' Ribkoff says dramatically, stressing it was simply a conversation. "I say, 'I do.' She says, 'You know my mind. I say, 'I do."'

Ribkoff said he asked the woman, whom he had never met before, how he knew her so well.

She said the clothes "speak to me" and "I feel great," he said.

"It's that kind of thing that I have experienced throughout my career. We've really gone after a particular consumer. It's not magic."

The woman he is targeting likes a lot of attention and will spend from about $60 to several hundred dollars to buy his clothes.

"She's a woman whether she lives it or not, whether it's fantasy or reality, who is a party animal," he said in a recent interview to mark the company's half-century in business.

"She loves to go out and have a good time," Ribkoff said. "They tell me this themselves. It's not something I've dreamt up."

Although Ribkoff tried outsourcing to Asia about 20 years ago, he prefers homegrown production.

"We didn't decide to stay in Canada because we want to protect jobs. That would be a lie. We are very happy that everybody benefits. We try to follow what's best for the business."

Retail analyst Wendy Evans said it's unusual for this kind of company to have the "Made in Canada" label.

"Slowly but surely they've all been going offshore," said Evans of Toronto-based Evans and Company Consultants.

"If you've got it all under one roof you can manage quality far better than by outsourcing. You've got a much better handle on the quality of the work and the timing (to market) so it's a quality control issue."

Evans also noted there aren't a lot of companies with their own brand labels left in Canada.

Ribkoff got into the business by accident after he dropped out of school at the age of 15. He started working for a clothing business for $16 a week and was sweeping floors, delivering messages and cleaning thread off sewing machines at night.

At 21, he started his own women's clothing company and had trouble settling on a name and ended up being in business for three months without a proper name.

Many of the names he had chosen had already been taken and with some advice from a retail friend and his accountant, he settled on Joseph Ribkoff.

Although he doesn't release sales figures, he notes "we've never had a losing year, nowhere near a losing year in 50 years."