Taking the pain out of doing shirts
hirts are a pain
because we treat them as the red-headed stepchild. Right from
the start — when a customer comes to the counter with
shirts — they are treated as an outsider.
There is one procedure for all of the
items that we service — pants, dresses, sweaters, suits,
coats, jackets, ties, gowns, blazers, etc. — and a
different procedure for shirts. In some plants, learning to
mark in shirts is considered to be advanced training. It is
something that you are taught after you’ve learned some
of the more basic things, like running the computer, waiting on
customers and vacuuming the rug.
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Rather than trying to make them
self-sufficient, we accept them for what we think they will
always be: a pain. This just isn’t fair. When we do
bother to analyze the department’s income and expenses,
we usually conclude that the remedy for whatever ails it lies
in either raising prices or cutting expenses or increasing
volume.
The idea of raising prices is often
quickly jettisoned because of competitive pressures. Expenses
have already obviously been reduced to a minimum because the
department runs short-handed and we steadfastly refuse to add
personnel.
Increasing volume is the path we often
take, only to eventually learn that this either does nothing,
magnifies our problems or causes us to lose even more money.
As an additional oddity, how queer is it
that we sometimes reduce the price to get more volume. We
settle on dealing with shirts as a loss-leader. After all,
that’s how we get that super-lucrative drycleaning.
Shirts are a pain because the equipment
necessary to do them is expensive and specialized. There
probably is one singular thing that is more frustrating than
dropping $50,000 or more on a shirt unit, and that is finding
out that you can’t do as a good a job as the
“professionals” at the trade show once you get that
shirt unit into your store.
I thought that we were the professionals?
It is indeed aggravating to need to buy a new shirt unit so
that we can make no money on them. Although we may not ever use
our legger for anything but pressing pants, there is a comfort
zone there in our hearts that says we could use it to press
anything if we really had to. Not so with the shirt unit. Try
as hard as I might, but I still can’t press a pleated
dress on the shirt unit. It is for shirts only. Period.
Shirts are a pain because they take up an
unfair amount of space in the plant. What about all that real
estate? Just for shirts? Are you kidding?
Three big pieces of equipment? Surely, you
jest.
Shirts are a pain because the revenue that
they generate is disproportional to the amount of headaches
they cause. Shirts are a pain because they require 50 percent
of our management time and provide only 20 percent of our gross
revenue.
Sometimes we sub-contract the headaches to
another person or party. Does that cure all? Hardly. Sometimes
it’s worse. And subbing out the shirts doesn’t
necessarily mean that we use a shirt wholesaler either.
Sometimes it just means that we have a manager in that
department who deals with stuff that we don’t want to
deal with. Things like training, absenteeism, service,
quality… uh, everything.
Somehow we still feel the pressure though,
either because we see the myriad of issues that exist or
because we know that customers still have complaints in spite
of our efforts or because payroll is too high even when we are
short-handed!
All of this would be a whole lot more
acceptable if only we were able to charge more for our shirts.
Perhaps our revenue per piece is $2 less than it is for a
drycleaning piece, but we spend just as much time administering
issues with shirts as with drycleaning.
If we sub-out the shirts to a wholesaler,
we have no sympathy for his plight. When a customer complains
or when we need to double-check every shirt for missing buttons
to head-off complaints, we’re suitably annoyed. We
believe that we have delegated this chore and we really
shouldn’t have to do this.
Furthermore, we believe that we are paying
a premium for this wholesale service, further reducing our
revenue, not to mention increasing our personal work load. We
reason that if we did our own shirts, they would be perfect and
our cost would be less.
Shirts are a pain because it takes a while
to train a presser. Pressing shirts is more of a specialty than
other items, so much so that we sometimes over-pay a shirt
presser just because we have found someone who is good and we
want to keep that person on the staff. If a presser does an
inferior press job on a shirt, the touch up necessary may take
longer than it took to press the shirt (correctly or
incorrectly) in the first place.
This is important, and contributes heavily
to making shirts a royal pain.
Conversely, when an inspector finds a
pressing defect on, say, a pair of pants, the touch-up
necessary to bring the garment from unacceptable to acceptable
often takes mere seconds — a quick pass with the
all-steam iron or dancing the pants, still on the hanger, over
a puffer and you’re done.
Try that with shirts. It will yield poor
results.
We are in denial that shirts are an
integral part of the clothing care business. They are and we
want them to remain so. Shirt pressing can not be duplicated at
home. It becomes addictive. Once your customer’s cotton
oxford has been starched and pressed professionally, it is
difficult to accept the same garment spray starched and
hand-pressed, however meticulously and lovingly. We need to
realize that some customers bring you drycleaning because they
have to go to the cleaners anyway for the shirt service.
Not to be confused with one who is content
with noticing problems and then leaving them as they are, I
will discuss each of the issues over the next few months and
see if there is anything that can be done about dealing with
them.
I have a positive attitude. Nothing has
ever been accomplished with a negative attitude.
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@comcast.net and he has a web sites located at: www.tailwindshirts.com and www.dondesrosiers.com
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