hat do shirt
customers hate the most? If we can get inside our
customer’s heads, if we can understand what makes them
happy and what makes them angry or annoys them, then we should
be able to follow a path that leads us to a better shirt. I
think that, in reality, we think that we know what is in their
heads, but I suspect that many times we concentrate on our own
pet peeves and forget to put ourselves in the customer’s
place. We forget to think like them.
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This is not my intention at all. My
intention is to remind you to never forget to think like a
customer and see the big picture, as well as the details and to
see the big picture in spite of the details. I believe that
many launderers may be over-emphasizing one detail while
remaining oblivious to the importance of another detail that,
to a customer, is at least as significant as your personal pet
peeve. You see, the customer never sees the big picture. All
they ever see is their shirts — first soiled and
wrinkled, then clean and pressed.
Consider this hypothetical shirt with a
missing button and a wrinkle across the back. Assume that the
inspection process caught one of the defects, but not the
other. Take your pick. It doesn’t matter which you did
and which you didn’t do. There is a part of our brain
that wants credit from the customer for the defect that we did
fix. Yes, it may be a subconscious desire for credit.
In actuality, we (probably) don’t
say; “Yes, Mr. Smith, you’re right. We smashed the
collar buttons on your shirt and left them that way, but there
used to be wrinkle in the cuff, and we fixed that. Aren’t
you glad about that?”
You surely already know that a customer
could not possibly care less about anything that you did, but
he will likely be perturbed about the things that you
didn’t do. The realization that doing shirts is a
thankless job can’t be a surprise.
Coming up with a list of what is important
to a customer is arbitrary, but there is some logic and some
science to it, so based on my experience as a customer, coupled
with my experience as a shirt launderer, here is my
semi-subjective list of possible quality defects. There are but
two items on the list.
Missing Buttons
1. I’ll have to say the worst thing
that you can do is send a shirt back with a critical button
missing.
A non-critical button would be one that
does not render the shirt unwearable, such as a sleeve button
or the bottom button on the front or a pocket button. A
critical button is probably any of the others. I remember
something that happened to me about 15 years ago when I was
relatively new in the wholesale shirt business. I expected that
I may be recognized as the “shirt guy” when I
packed my bags to attend the local IFI affiliate’s trade
show.
Wanting to make sure that I made a good
impression, I packed a neatly and professionally folded
button-down dress shirt — just one — to attend the
convention. I brought along some casual clothes for the prior
evening’s festivities.
The morning of the convention, I was
absolutely mortified that the singular dress shirt that I
packed was missing a collar button! I was frantic, furious and
desperate. After all, it was my employee that allowed this to
happen. I sought out one of those little sewing kits that you
can get from the front desk at a hotel, cut off the button on
the sleeve and used that button to button-down the collar. I
then sewed the button that was in the little sewing kit to the
sleeve to replace the one that I’d cut off with my Swiss
Army knife.
I was extremely unhappy about doing this.
I did not think like a shirt launderer or a drycleaner that
day. Thinking like a drycleaner may have happened if I had with
me another shirt to wear. I didn’t and was suitably
annoyed.
This experience taught me to think like a
customer. Way before it was fashionable to say “think out
of the box,” I was out of this box that we refer to as
our plants and was thrust into a situation that forced me to
experience a problem that a customer could have.
I would have learned little or nothing
from this experience if I had simply tossed the unwearable
shirt back into my suitcase and wore another one, perhaps just
a tad sympathetic to the plight of plant employees. I got my
shirts done for free. There were no allowances for that in my
thought processes on this particular day. A customer would
likely be even more perturbed if he or she had jingled up a
couple of bucks for an unwearable garment.
Pressed-in wrinkles
2. If any area in the upper, front part of
the shirt has a hard, pressed-in wrinkle, like a diagonal
crease going from the collar button area down towards the
armpit, the shirt is unwearable. Picture a shirt that is folded
over an 8x14 shirt board. The collar of the shirt and any other
part that is visible while the shirt is folded is the critical
part of the shirt. This area is top priority.
I really hate it when I see a touch-up
person ironing out the wrinkles in the tail of the shirt,
justifying their existence on the payroll, but leave an ugly
crease in the collar or at some other, clearly visible place. I
guess that they leave the latter because it’s harder to
fix. The problem here, other than simply not doing as good a
job as possible, is failure to think like a customer. Do you
really think that it matters to the average customer whether or
not the tail of the shirt is pressed perfectly wrinkle free? It
is a low priority touch-up.
Now my own words are misleading.
“Low-priority” touch-up sounds like something that
you do when you have run out of high-priority touch-ups or when
there are no high-priority touch-ups to attend to.
This is flawed for at least two reasons:
First, it leads to a variable standard. Second, it will cause a
touch-up person to migrate towards the types of touch-up that
are easy to do, not those that are important to the customer.
Outwardly, your touch-up person will look
busy always, but the labor used will not be significantly
improving your shirts. Doing unnecessary touch-up often leads
to excess labor cost. It snowballs into extraordinarily high
labor cost if left unchecked.
When management sets standards for
touch-up people, it is easy to measure their effectiveness. For
instance, let’s say that the standard at XYZ Cleaners is
these three quality points:
1. All wrinkles removed from the tail of
the shirt. The touch-up person must remove curls or folds that
have been pressed in by the body press.
2. The box pleats on the back of the shirt
need to be within an inch of each other in length. There are
some cleaners that have this rule. Now I want to make clear
that I don’t disapprove of this rule, it’s just
that I doubt that a customer would consider it important. More
importantly, there are perhaps more generic — less
specific — defects that a customer would object to, but
because the quality of the shirt can not be judged so
decisively as it can be with a yardstick in this case,
management may unconsciously approve a substandard shirt.
3. Tail clamp marks must be removed. Just
like items one and two, this is easy to evaluate: It is pass or
fail, yes or no, black or white.
All of these standards will raise the
quality standard of your shirts, but these standards have an
unspoken assumption. That assumption is that the shirt is
already “perfect.” Huh?
If you adopt standards such as these, you
must have an exceptional shirt to start off with. All of the
things that a customer expects must already be a given. If you
choose to raise the bar beyond that what a customer expects,
then you are an exceptional business man. I once wrote,
“exceed a customer’s expectations and you will
succeed.” This is as true as it ever was.
So the key is to know what they expect,
never forget it, give them that, then go beyond. Let’s
take a look at what they expect:
• A clean shirt, no ring around the
collar, no stains.
• A smoothly pressed collar, no
wrinkles.
• The collar folded exactly where it
should be — right on the seam.
• The perfect level of starch (or
lack of it). They might not know what it’s called —
light starch, heavy starch, secret-double heavy starch —
but they have in their minds what they think is right and what
is wrong.
• Two collar buttons in the perfect
condition, firmly attached with the proper color thread. If the
button is chipped, cracked or broken, they will not understand
because they are not likely to be familiar with the processes
through which their shirts undergo. If a button looks like it
went to war, the customer may conclude that you put the shirt
through a more rigorous ordeal then they do themselves.
• A smooth, hard-pressed buttonhole
band. No bubbles, wrinkles or rough-dry look.
• The entire front of the shirt free
of pressed-in wrinkles. No rough, dry area. Many customers have
come to expect a tail clamp mark because billions of shirts
were pressed with them long before there was such a thing as a
vacuum buck. I am personally responsible for about 7 million of
those shirts. It is completely possible that your customers now
expect the complete lack of a tail clamp imprint. That’s
OK. If you’ve raised the bar on quality and given your
customers higher expectations, then good for you. Doing things
like this will certainly keep your competitors on their toes.
• The entire back of the shirt free
of pressed-in wrinkles. No rough, dry areas here either.
• There are lots more things.
Frankly, I could go on and on and still
forget some specifics. My point this month is to remind you to
take care of your customer’s annoyances before your own,
even though you may find that your customer’s annoyances
are harder to measure than your own.
In a nutshell: ABC Cleaners and XYZ
Cleaners both do an extra-ordinary shirt. ABC Cleaners wants a
competitive edge over XYZ. He decides to iron in the sleeve
pleats, clip the cuffs together with clips and iron out every
little crease in the tail of the shirt. ABC oozes attention to
detail and trumps XYZ.
We, of course, must assume that ABC is
still doing all of the things that had him doing an
extraordinary shirt in the first place. If ABC gets so caught
up in doing the three little things that were meant to outdo
XYZ, but in the meantime has allowed buttons to become a
problem, ring around the collar to become more common and press
quality to become an issue, does ABC still trump XYZ?
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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