Not Fade Away Makes Mark in Tie-Dye Apparel : Clothing: Firm holds license to produce T-shirts and other memorabilia for Woodstock concert.

There is nothing far out about the old shirt factory Not Fade Away Graphics occupies, nothing groovy about its weathered brick facade or the rusting barbed wire that keeps would-be thieves out.

And the company’s founder, Martin Leffer, is decidedly not laid back, although he sometimes props his legs up on his desk and leans back against a makeshift bookcase.

“You’ve got to watch people because sometimes they will take advantage of you,” he said.

This is not the philosophy of the 1960s, which the 46-year-old Leffer is a product of, and which his tie-dye T-shirt and hat business depends on for nostalgia and chic. But it may be a clear-eyed appraisal of the ‘90s, in which Not Fade Away competes for a buck in the worlds of sports and music merchandise.

The company holds licensing agreements to produce T-shirts and other tie-dye memorabilia for the 25th Woodstock Anniversary concert being held in nearby Saugerties.

“I see our Woodstock stuff being strong for a good year,” he said. “If it’s a memorable concert, we think it could be good for 25 more years.”

Even before Woodstock ’94 came along, Leffer had already gotten Not Fade Away products into some 3,000 retail stores worldwide thanks to some canny marketing and the public’s persistent appetite for tie-dye apparel.

“Sooner or later, everything gets recycled and comes back,” said Bruce Sachenski, editor of Imprinting Business, a screen-printing trade publication in South Plainfield, N.J. “It has a lot to do with the maturing of the customers. A lot of the people who are buying them now were hippies or Grateful Dead people a while back who never lost the appeal for that style. And now it’s something new for the young people.”

Commercial tie-dyers today use stronger dyes, two or more colors and more symmetrical patterns than the basement or back-yard tie-dyers of the ‘60s. Most also add screen-printed designs to the same garments, or more sophisticated flourishes on hats such as embroidered emblems.

“Manufacturers are getting more sophisticated with their designs,” said Ellen Parker, associate editor of the Dallas-based garment trade publication Impressions. “People are not going to be satisfied with just a plain, tie-dye, twisted rubber band-type of garment from the ‘60s.”

Along with more elaborate designs have come upscale prices. It is now common for a tie-dye T-shirt with a screen-printed design to cost between $25 and $30, Parker said.

Not Fade Away is a licensed marketer of Grateful Dead merchandise, and nearly half of its T-shirt catalogue is a variation on the Dead theme--the band’s trademark skeleton as a jack-in-the-box, a skull in a bed of shamrocks, the skeleton skiing down a slope of snow and so forth.

Not Fade Away also has a line of T-shirts with the likeness of the late reggae artist Bob Marley.

Nearly as lucrative has been the company’s connection with sports. When the Grateful Dead sponsored the Lithuanian basketball team at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Not Fade Away supplied the red, gold and green warm-ups, with the figure of a skeleton dunking a basketball on the jerseys.

The team wore the warm-ups when collecting its bronze medals, and, nearly overnight, Not Fade Away arrived as a force in its industry. It was a heady time for a company on the fringes of the counterculture and the conventional business world. By the end of the first week after the Olympics, it received 50,000 orders for Lithuanian warm-up T-shirts from around the globe.

Not Fade Away has also made T-shirts for the U.S. ski team at the 1994 Olympics, basketball’s Portland Trailblazers and hockey’s New York Rangers.

Leffer’s appearance doesn’t suggest a captain of an industry. Short, lean and intense with curly, graying hair and beard, he spent most of the 1970s at a spiritual community in Tennessee. When his marriage collapsed, he returned to his native Upstate New York. He was a ski instructor before tie-dye became his life in the early 1980s.

His office is also unremarkable. Two sets of mounted and framed tickets from the original Woodstock show in 1969 are on the wall. There’s a dirty Oriental rug on the floor and a pair of old socks beneath the desk. Over his head is a framed letter dated March, 1993, thanking him for the blue jeans jackets.

“What a great gift!” President Bill Clinton writes on White House stationery.