Wanted: hard
worker needed to do my shirts, wholesale. Long hours, low pay. Benefits
include the satisfaction of being my punching bag, but do not include
medical benefits such as aspirin for the headaches that I will provide,
nor the anti-anxiety drugs. Inquire within.
How would you like to answer this ad? Seems that,
in some markets, many drycleaners do
answer less explicit ads for the same thing
— doing shirts wholesale. I wonder, this month, if the shirt
wholesaler should survive. Or should it be that drycleaners of all
sizes migrate towards an on-premise shirt laundry.
The shirt wholesaler is an odd thing really. Not
too many businesses have such a thing as this. Sure, some businesses do
have products that are offered for the convenience of the customer and
are done by another vendor. Film-processing at the pharmacy comes to
mind, for example. But because the products aren’t similar
— prescription drugs and vacation photos — we never think
that it’s odd that the film processing is handled by someone
else. In fact, it seems natural that the task would be handled by a
specialist.
In the case of the drycleaner and shirt service,
the average consumer is shocked to learn that their shirts are taken
away by a third party and done elsewhere. They can barely comprehend
it, even though they never doubted that the drug store subs out the
celluloid.
So many fields are specialized now —
physicians, attorneys, and auto mechanics — we accept it as the
norm. We think nothing of going to a one lawyer for a divorce and to
another for a slip and fall. The difference between that and the
drycleaning and shirts thing is that lawyers aren’t in the
business of customer convenience and good service and we don’t
need the two lawyers at the same time. But we are likely to need the
garments cared for simultaneously.
Our desire as business people to meet customer
needs steps up to the plate and we wish to “specialize” in
both. I’m not even sure that makes any sense.
More senseless still is a drycleaner who chooses
not to offer shirt service. This does happen from time to time and is
often the result of some bad experiences with a shirt wholesaler
coupled with the desire to cease customer complaints about shirts.
The feeling is that the drycleaner can
“control” the quality of the drycleaned garments but
hasn’t the same ability for shirt quality. Should this drycleaner
offer shirt service through a shirt wholesaler?
Yes, he should, but he probably does not for a
very good reason. It may be that there is no good shirt wholesaler
around. That can’t sound too odd. Perhaps you feel that you are
in such an area. It could be that this is the very reason that you have
a shirt unit yourself. It follows, then, that given a lack of a good
wholesaler… no. Given the lack of a shirt wholesaler that
produces a product on par with the quality of your drycleaning, you
venture into the shirt business, perhaps blindly.
There are a couple of problems with this.
First, you just may not be any more qualified to
do a good shirt than your shirt wholesaler. Second, you will not see
the problems as vividly as you do when you can blame them on someone
else.
I remember a guy I had as a wholesale customer off
and on. He initially had no shirt unit, then, he got one of those
lay-down units. Then he used me for wholesale shirts and later bought a
three-piece cabinet style shirt unit.
When I first met him, he had the lay-down unit.
His quality was pathetic. He didn’t replace buttons and many of
the cuffs and collars had ugly pressed-in wrinkles.
Ironically, he thought that he was producing great
quality and considered his process to be “hand-finished.”
Frankly, he either wore blinders or actually was legally blind.
He probably was sympathetic to the plight of his
shirt presser and was probably unable to produce an excellent quality
shirt on his bantam unit himself. He became complacent and stopped
seeing the real problems.
When I started doing his shirts some time later,
he was most unforgiving. Now he could ride me like his customers had
surely ridden him in the past. Now he had somebody to blame. Seeing the
problems was easy. Fixing them was delegated to someone else —
me. Believe it or not, having a customer like this was just the ticket
for me. It kept me on my toes, always.
I believe that the shirt wholesaler should prevail
because shirts really are a specialty. But because shirts and
drycleaning are similar, especially in the consumer’s eyes, they
must be available at the same place. Unlike the two lawyers with
different store fronts in different parts of town, a shirts-only retail
operation is doomed from conception because it inconveniences the
customer.
It follows then, that the drycleaner must offer
quality shirt service to his or her customers, but must be awfully good
at it.
Surely, there are many large plants that can
easily afford to have not only an on-premise laundry, but also a highly
qualified staff that perhaps does make them uniquely qualified to do a
premium job. If they aren’t what Webster’s would call a
“specialist” by definition, I bet that they are at least a
little better than those who think that they are a specialist by
definition.
The shirt wholesaler was never intended to replace
those stores that do substantial shirt volume. (I know, I know…
define “substantial,”) But I think that there are many
drycleaners doing under 3,000 shirts per week who would be better
served by a shirt wholesaler, if, and only if, that wholesaler did a
great job and gave great service.
Management in these not small, but smaller plants,
would better serve customers if they only had to concern themselves
with drycleaning rather than drycleaning and shirts. The management
required in the shirt department is disproportionate to the gross
revenue that it generates.
Many shirt wholesalers out there are not a
compliment to the industry. They contribute to the “dirty
word” that is “wholesale shirts.”
So, shirt wholesalers as they are by and large are
not such a good idea, but the concept is right.
Next month, I’ll show you how to set up a
wholesale shirt laundry.
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@attbi.com and he has a web sites located at: www.tailwindshirts.com and www.dondesrosiers.com
