t’s been a few
years since the introduction of shirt units with blow-dry
sleeves. Is this an innovation? Or is it a gimmick? When
you’re trying to sell anything, you do need to come up
with gimmicks that will open the doors for new customers. This
is because a salesperson never knows what key feature —
or particular sales pitch — will close a deal. It differs
greatly among individuals.
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So when a new feature is introduced
or a new advantage is brought to light or a new slogan is
heard, the point is to entice you. In fact, if it gets your
attention, you are probably one of the people that the
advertiser or manufacturer was trying to attract. So far, they
have succeeded. Closing the deal, of course, is the real goal.
So do I think that blown sleeves are a
gimmick? Yes. Is it good for you?
I think that you will agree that it is
good for you by the time you get through reading this. It is
important to understand that a gimmick isn’t likely to be
bad, at least not intended to be bad, but the word sounds like
a euphemism for deception. It sounds like an attempt to pull
the wool over your eyes. This isn’t the intention of a
sales “gimmick.” If I check my thesaurus, I get
four synonyms for “gimmick.”
They are: “attention-grabber;”
“device;” “trick;” and “publicity
stunt.” Some of those words have negative connotations. I
don’t like “trick” in this instance.
If blown sleeves are tricking you, you
will be pleasantly surprised at what I have to say. I guess
— and I stress that it is a guess — that blown
sleeves were introduced to entice those who were short on
space. The gimmick being that you only need two pieces of
equipment instead of the usual three.
Perhaps there were dollar savings as well
— one less piece of machinery to buy or maintain or fix.
But I don’t think that this is the way that it has worked
out. The gimmick has turned into a very interesting improvement
in quality and I plan to prove it to you.
When air-dried sleeves were first
introduced (I think it was 15 years ago), the quality was not
good. The products that are out there now are not similar to
these old units. Let’s make sure that we understand this
up front. I am generally skeptical about innovation, but I can
be convinced.
I better be. For one thing, what I do for
a living is rather innovative and I certainly want the people
that I talk to be open-minded and convincible. I must keep an
open mind to innovation and understand what sales
“devices” are for. Most important, I must try to
see through them and evaluate the end result: Is the product
better, worse or the same?
If it’s better, everybody wins. The
seller makes a sale and the buyer does a better shirt, or at a
lower cost or in less space or any combination of these, and
perhaps other, features.
If the “gimmick” causes you to
buy something that causes you to make sacrifices, that
“something” still may not be bad. But in that case,
you must evaluate these sacrifices and be assured that you
don’t give up something that you treasure.
This is the bane of everyone who
investigates the purchase of anything. Most often, the
potential buyer will feel certain that the seller won’t
discuss the negative aspects of this venture. That is left up
to the buyer to beware. This is unfortunate.
There are some products out there that can
truly change your life. But the buyer remains skeptical.
Whatever the reason that blown sleeves
where re-introduced, they have brought along some interesting
advantages, even if they were accidental.
Perhaps they were not by accident, but
I’ve never heard the salespeople mention them. It could
be that they simply don’t try to sell me any equipment. I
don’t need any.
It is true that if you have a conventional
three-piece unit in very good operating condition, you can do a
fine job on many shirts. But if you factor in the
idiosyncrasies of the real-world situations of dozens of
different cuts of shirts and all different types of employees,
you open a Pandora’s box full of potential pressing
quality issues.
Last month, we talked about the hazards of
allowing your equipment or your employees to manage your
business for you. Although I will certainly maintain that your
equipment will never manage your business, anything that you
find that helps you to manage things is surely worth something.
Remember that all employees did everything
that they were supposed to do all of the time, management would
not be needed. So what does this have to do with blown sleeves
vs. hard pressed sleeves? More than you may think.
It is much easier to do a good job with
blown sleeves. It is impossible to make some ugly mistakes with
a blown sleeve unit that are very easy to make with a
three-piece unit.
Getting specific
Want specifics? They’re coming.
If you can get your shirt pressers to do
exactly what they are supposed to do all of the time without
sacrificing anything, including speed, then you probably will
not benefit from a change from a conventional unit to a blown
sleeve unit.
However, that is a tall order. In fact, I
train people for a living and I have never left a plant without
re-training the sleeve presser. Follow-up training and
supervision falls upon your shoulders, and that’s where
you benefit with a blown sleeve type unit.
The four most common places on a shirt
that need touch up are eliminated when a sleeve is blown dry.
FOUR! In no particular order, those four areas are:
1. The transition area between the cuff
and the sleeve. When a cuff is
clipped to a sleeve press it is vital that it is attached at
the same place. If you attach one cuff a bit higher than the
other, quality will suffer. The measuring device will align the
steam chest with the length of the sleeve that you measured
(the one on the right). One sleeve will be pressed more than
the other.
How ugly this is depends upon many things.
For instance, if your presser attached one cuff too high, this
will cause an area between the sleeve and the cuff to be
unpressed.
This is particularly embarrassing to you
because a customer may see this area every time he looks at his
wrist watch. Alternately, you can have the unpressed area near
the shoulder seam.
With a blown-sleeve type machine,
attaching the cuff at the right place is particularly easy and
most important, the penalty for non-compliance is often
unnoticeable or non-existent. Because the entire sleeve is
filled with super-heated, pressurized air, no part of the
sleeve is left unpressed.
2. The sleeve pleats. The sleeve pleats are difficult to press
properly on many sleeve presses. Some equipment will put
diagonal pressed-in wrinkles near the sleeve gusset (that area
that often has a button).
The possibility of pressed-in wrinkles
anywhere on the sleeves is completely eliminated if the sleeves
are dried with hot air. So is the possibility of smashed
buttons on the sleeves. When I first learned to press shirts,
it was on a Unipress MSA. This unit is a notorious button
smasher. (Smile if you know what sleever I am talking about).
3. Shoulder area. There is a rather popular cut of casual shirt that is
broader at the chest than a dress shirt of the same size when
measured from sleeve seam to sleeve seam. The steam chests will
not touch this area even on a unit that has blown sleeves.
However, on such a unit, the air pressure in the sleeves will
pull that area taut and the heated air will dry it, thereby
eliminating mandatory touch-up. A big plus.
4. Over-pressing of the sleeves. A misadjusted measuring device on the
sleever is very common. This critical device doesn’t
exist on the new-fangled units. If this device is improperly
adjusted or you have a careless operator, the chance of
pressing a portion of the front of the shirt on the sleeve
press is high. Because this front part of the shirt
doesn’t lay flat against the head or the buck, sharp,
ugly, pressed in wrinkles are the result. These can be anywhere
from barely an inch long to several inches.
All of these touch-up issues can be
avoided or corrected even if you keep your conventional
sleever, but at what cost? Additional touch-up labor? Reduced
productivity?
If you get the idea that your conventional
sleever is the cause of a great deal of your quality issues,
you guessed correctly, but there is another really interesting
advantage of the new style units that I bet you can’t
guess.
Gross negligence
I think that the grossest thing that you
can do to a shirt is to send it out with some moisture
remaining in it. You would think that the most common area that
would have moisture remaining is at the collar, but I
don’t find that to be true.
I think that this is because the shirt
goes to the body press and then to a collar cone after being
pressed. Both of these procedures serve to hasten the drying
process if it happens that there is still moisture remaining in
the collar. There is no catalyst for the drying process if the
moisture remaining in a shirt is in the button-hole placket.
If the back of the placket is still damp,
it will still pass inspection, but the dry part of the shirt
will act as a wick and ruin the smoothly pressed front of the
shirt.
What does this have to do with a shirt
unit that uses hot air to dry the sleeves, you ask? With a
sleeve press, you can dry a sleeve in 15 seconds or less. The
air-drying process requires about two times as long.
Because of this fact, the steam chest
continues to squeeze the shirt for 30 seconds or more. Not only
does this assure that the sleeves are dry, but it also is ample
time to fully dry the button hole placket! This is a built-in
quality improvement!
Even if you have a fast presser who is
notorious for hitting the “stop” button in order to
expedite, when this presser switches to a blown sleeve unit
he/she will not be able to shorten the cycle because it takes
the full 30 seconds to unload and then reload the buck on one
of these units. A fully dried shirt is virtually guaranteed!
The trade-off
OK then, what is the trade off? Surely,
there must be one. Actually, there are three sacrifices that
you’ll need to make, and here they are in increasing
order of seriousness:
1. The
thickest part of the shirt is that pentagon-shaped stack of
fabric a couple of inches down from the elbow that connects
both parts of the sleeve gusset. This part of the shirt will be
“rough dried” as it will come off the shirt press
still damp. On your conventional unit, you might dry this part
completely, but surely you will dry the outside surface of it
and it will be hard-pressed and smooth. This is one of your
three concessions.
Although I loath the thought of a
“shirt sent out wet,” I don’t think that this
qualifies. There’s a chance that you’ve never
noticed this part of a shirt. There’s a bigger chance
that your customers have never noticed this part of a shirt.
2. I have a
personal feeling about a professionally pressed and starched
shirt. I think that the cuff should be hard and round. You need
to flatten the cuff area in order to slide it into those cuff
clips on the blown-sleeve units or, in the case of Sankosha,
you need to fold the cuff around that little press platform. In
either case, the cuff is subsequently steamed in a folded
position. You lose the rounded look that I like.
Remember that this is me — a
personal taste thing. I think that it is a very minor quality
issue.
3. On many of
these units, you will get a pinch mark on certain types of
shirts, usually cotton broadcloth with heavy starch. I
don’t like the looks of that very much.
I have never heard a criticism, complaint
or even a comment about any of these three defects. Not one. In
fact, they are hardly noticeable. On the other hand, the
defects that can be caused by a conventional sleeve press have
generated an untold number of complaints from customers and
rightly so.
I started in this business when I was very
young. Because of that I feel like a stubborn old man about
some things. I hate to admit it, but I think that “blown
sleeves” trump hard pressed sleeves. I sure haven’t
always thought that.
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
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