Happy New Year to all in the drycleaning and
laundry business! With the dawn of 2002 comes some random thoughts
about your shirts and your shirt plant. I bet that you’ve
doubted, at times, whether or not your shirt equipment actually does
smash buttons. Want to remove all doubt? Open up the sleeve press and
look at the very bottom of the press under the steam chests —
depending upon which model you have, that may be the floor. See all of
that white dust peppering the lint? That is smashed button dust. Your
press is breaking buttons. Your customers
aren’t kidding.
Two-hole buttons are stronger than four-hole
buttons.
Use the super-strong buttons only in the places
where your equipment actually breaks buttons, like sleeve gusset
buttons or tail clamp buttons. Otherwise, save your pennies.
That air-leak will not fix itself.
When equipment breaks, it’s not such a bad
thing. It breaks because you are in the business of using equipment. If
it never broke, it’s because you aren’t using it. My father
always used to say that. It’s true.
If you save a dollar a thousand times, you’ll
save $1,000.
Your customers care more about quality and service
than about low prices. You should resolve to prove that to yourself
this year. The only reason that they pay the low price is because that
is all you asked for.
New equipment turns into used equipment practically
overnight.
When an employee tells you about malfunctioning
equipment, take it to heart and either get to it immediately or keep
them posted on the progress of the remedy. They will stop complaining
about the problem in a surprisingly short time because many of them
like to think that you don’t care — just like they
sometimes don’t care. If you keep them informed, they will never
think that you don’t care.
Example: The cuff clamp on the sleeve press breaks
and the presser tells you. If you say, “Okay, thanks Kim,”
and then you forget about it, she may not ever tell you about it again.
For one thing, clamping the cuff clamp is one less thing that Kim has
to do.
You may do the same thing for the next five things
that break and then find that there are lots of things wrong with your
equipment. No wonder you aren’t doing a good shirt.
If, instead, you make a note to call your parts
supplier — and then tell Kim that you called — you will
come off as a boss that cares. If you then tell Kim that your regular
supplier doesn’t have the part that you need, but someone in Utah
does have it and they’ll have it here by Thursday, Kim will know
for certain that you heard her and that what she says matters to you.
That attitude goes a long way.
If “ifs” and “buts” were
candy and nuts, Christmas would be everyday.
If you allow someone to smoke cigarettes in the
plant, the smell will be retained by the garments in your care. If you
smoke, you can’t smell it, but a non-smoker can smell it easily
and there will be (believe it or not) residual cigarette smoke smell in
the clothes. If your driver smokes in the truck while there are clothes
in it, those clothes will reek. (Except to a smoker). Maybe that is the
reason that you are losing customers to the guy across town. And you
thought that it was because his shirts were 25 cents less.
A business is like a wheelbarrow. If you don’t
push it, it won’t move.
Resolve to read a book titled Who Moved My Cheese?
It is about changes in life and it explores the different manners in
which we welcome them and deal with them. It was recommended to me over
a year ago by a dear friend and is well worth the time and minimal
cost.
I have since bought several copies and given them
away to people that I hardly know. If you are the type to resist
change, this will change your life. If you know someone, like an
employee or a subordinate who doesn’t look too kindly at change,
give them a copy of this book. You’ll be impressed with the
results.
Henry Ford said it: “Thinking is the hardest
job of all, that’s why we do so little of it.”
Expecting pressers to be able to inspect their own
work is like expecting an accountant to report on his own embezzlement.
The five most common shirt pressing errors in
order of their frequency based upon my totally unscientific survey are:
• Wrist area wrinkles. These wrinkles are usually caused by a loose, worn or
broken cuff clamp, but some equipment does a better job of pressing
this area than others.
• Wrinkles at the shoulder seams. This is caused by failing to use the sleeve press
properly or by misalignment of the sleeve measuring feature.
Interestingly, these two most common pressing errors disappear if and
when you go to those new units that “blow-dry” the sleeves.
Hmmm.
• Rough dry shoulder area on wide
shirts. This is the reason that you
have a touch-up department. If the shirt is wider than the buck,
touch-up will need to rise to the occasion and press/iron the parts of
the shirt that the machine is incapable of doing.
• Collars improperly folded. OK, this isn’t really pressing, but it is
done by your pressers. The collar must be folded right on the seam that
connects the collar and the collar band. If you don’t do it this
way, the shirt is ugly no matter how well you pressed everything else.
You will lose customers over this.
• Damp fronts. There are six possible reasons why the backs of the
button-hole bands are still damp/wet on heavy shirts. If this is
happening to your shirts, it is possible that the shirt looks perfect
off the press, but a few hours later, the dry part (the front of the
button-hole band that touched the head) has acted as a wick and
absorbed the moisture and essentially “unpressed” the front
of the shirt. Gross!
The six possible reasons: low air pressure; low
steam pressure; poor, improper or spent padding; high moisture
retention caused by inadequate extraction; too short pressing time;
mechanical restrictions that prevent the heads from squeezing tightly
enough.
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is
dressed in overalls and looks like work.
I don’t think that anybody ever actually
says, “Customers come to me because, since I am 19 cents cheaper
on shirts, they can save almost a dollar a week here.” But I
think that we have all sub-consciously feared that this may be true. I
know that I have. I have feared raising prices because I didn’t
want to lose any customers.
I think that this has happened because we are
survivors. Over the years, no matter what was been thrown at us, be it
hazardous waste disposal, sewer user tax or sky-rocketing solvent
costs, he have, for some reason absorbed much of the costs without
passing them on to the consumer.
Why?
I don’t know. But what I do know is that
breaking this cycle, and making up for lost time, so to speak, is a
Herculean task. The last thing that you want to do, though, is to
continue that trend.
Some people dream of success, while others wake up
and work hard at it.
Have you ever seen a shirt with wrinkles in the
cuffs? It is awful, surely the grossest pressing error that there is.
If you doubt that, try wearing a shirt with wrinkles in the cuffs. I
predict that you will hate it so much that you won’t want to look
at your wrist watch!
Good things may come to those who wait, but only
the things left by those who hustle.
Remember that adding more volume may not fix any
of your problems. If you are losing money and you think that the remedy
is more shirts, you may find yourself simply losing more money. But
more volume can also save you. Just don’t confuse “more
volume” with “infinitely more volume.”
For instance, 500 more shirts per week can mean
that your production goes up and all fixed costs remain constant,
netting you a clear $1,000 per month.
But another 500 shirts on top of that could easily
mean overtime, “rushed through,” bang and hang shirts that
generate complaints rather than revenue, the desperate need for
additional equipment, thereby increasing the so-called “fixed”
costs. You could easily lose your shirt. No pun intended. The trick is
to find a way to become profitable at the volume that you are at right
now. It’s possible, you know.
The pessimist finds difficulty in every
opportunity. The optimist sees an opportunity in every difficulty.
Happy New Year!
Donald Desrosiers has been in the shirt
laundering business since 1978 and is a work-flow systems engineer who
provides services to shirt launderers through Tailwind Shirt Systems,
867 Spencer St., Fall River, MA. He can be reached by phone at (508)
965-3163 or by e-mail at tailwind1@mediaone.net and he has a web sites located at: www.tailwindshirts.com and www.dondesrosiers.com
