5 things to do for a better shirt
Here are the top 5 things that you can do
in 2004 to improve your shirts
1. Get a starch cooker.
If you’ve been using pre-cooked
starch in your plant (like I always did in mine), you may
wonder why you’d need a starch cooker. After all, instant
starch can’t be that different than what comes out of
those machines, can it?
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If you price them out for the first time,
you just may be a good bit surprised at the purchase price of
one of these. Its about $7,000. That may really make you wonder
why in the world you need a starch cooker. You need one for the
quality improvement in your shirts, that’s all.
Assume, for a minute, that your $7,000
starch cooker lasts for five years and you do 100,000 shirts
per year. I have no reason to believe that you won’t get
much more life from your starch cooker than a mere five years,
but let’s just say that you’re unlucky and your
cooker will only starch 500,000 shirts. That is less than one
and a half cents per shirt more than what it costs you to
starch shirts now, assuming that the raw starch costs as much
as pre-cooked starch, which it doesn’t.
So, item one is to spend $7,000 on a
starch cooker, effectively increasing your cost per shirt
approximately one and a half cents each. OK?
2. Get a heated collar cone and use it
properly, every time.
There are three good ones and they are all
expensive. If the one that you’re considering costs about
$100, that isn’t one of them. One of your options is a
three-headed collar cone that rotates. Some manufacturers make
them with a slot for hangers, others do not. Some are
porcelain, some are metal. The metal heats up faster and cures
the shirt quicker, but can be a burn hazard.
Conversely, a porcelain cone is merely
pleasantly warm, but it will take longer to cure a collar and
longer to heat up in the morning. Remembering that I said that
you need to “get a heated collar cone and use it
properly.,” It will be difficult to use a collar cone
properly if hangers are in the way, keeping the collar from
making taut contact with the cone all the way around.
Feel free to get a cone that happens to
have a hanger slot, just don’t use it. Buy it for the
quality of the unit and the reputation of the dealer. Use a
nearby slick rail for hangers. A single collar cone, as opposed
to a three-headed collar cone, is fine for most cleaners.
Admittedly, you can’t
“over-cure” a collar, but there are space
ramifications to consider when using a three-headed cone. With
a single cone, if you cure a shirt on it for 30 to 60 seconds,
that is far, far better than using any cone incorrectly for any
length of time, shorter or longer.
If you want the most high-tech gadget for
finishing off a shirt, there is a collar cone that applies
tension on the collar while it cures it. The result is a very
dry, very round collar. Provided you use these devices
correctly, they will prevent that ugly, droopy collar that your
customers hate. If you’re using some type of packaging
device to prevent that now, it is probably because your
pressers aren’t using the cone you have properly, or you
don’t have one. (If you have one and don’t use it,
that counts as not having one.)
The collar cones that I recommend cost
between $600 and $1,300. Assuming the same 500,000 shirts,
(which is ridiculous as any of these will last indefinitely)
the “cost per shirt” for the collar cone is
virtually nothing. Sure, you can argue that three light bulbs
per month will amount to something and if the porcelain one
falls over and shatters there will be a surprise repair cost.
Well, there is a rebuttal to both of those
issues. First, a collar cone needs to be bolted down to the
floor. You can not use it correctly otherwise. When it’s
bolted down, you can not knock it over. Regarding the light
bulbs (assuming that yours is heated with one): go to the
electrical supply store (not a home center), and ask for the
best, most durable, “rough-service” light bulb.
Only a “rough-service” light bulb will do in a
collar cone. Ask them if they have this in 130 volt. I did say
VOLT and I don’t mean watts. One maker of light bulbs has
their entire line rated for 130 volts. Since normal line
voltage is 110-120, a 130 volt bulb lasts infinitely longer
than a standard light bulb and they don’t cost any more
either. While you’re there, pick up a lamp timer. Back at
the plant, install the 130-volt rough-service light bulb and
set the collar cone to turn on and off by the timer. This way,
it will be heated up when the first shirt comes off the press
in the morning and it won’t matter if someone forgets to
shut it off at night. So I have added $10 to $15 to the cost of
a collar cone, but now you have an “insurance plan”
with it — insurance that it will always be used properly.
3. Have a friend in the business come
through your plant and make a list of minor fixes that your
shirt equipment needs.
If you have a major breakdown today, you
will shell out $1,000 or more to fix it, if not reluctantly.
The minor things that only cost a few bucks to fix are forever
deferred. Five or so of these minor issues either annoys the
operator or gives that operator the impression that you
don’t care. Have your maintenance guy take care of those
minor issues. It’ll make you feel great as well as your
pressers.
4. Vow to “under-promise” and
“over-deliver.”
Stop deferring orders that
“aren’t due today.” If it’s in the
plant, do it. You may think that you don’t have the
capacity, but that probably is not true. If you do 1,000 pieces
today, but 500 of them where deferred from yesterday, you will
also defer 500 pieces until tomorrow. It is still 1,000 pieces.
You have the capacity, but you are just behind the 8-ball. Bit
by bit, over the next week or two, improve your service by
doing a bit more than is “due.” There isn’t
really a need to change the delivery or promise dates at the
counter.
The point is this: If you have a shirt or
any garment for a week and the customer is told that “We
need more time” or “a signature is required,”
you won’t look so swift. The customer has no grasp of the
fact that you only started to work on it yesterday. As far as
the customer is concerned, you had it a whole week.
Alternately, if you knew that this garment
wasn’t due for a week, but did it anyway, you just may
earn a customer for life if you get a call from that customer
begging for their clothes two days early. Cost to implement:
Some thought, some planning, some initiative. $0.
5. Raise your prices. Most months I talk about adding value to your
shirt service — increasing the perceived value. When the
guy across the street lowers his prices, raise yours! And when
a customer asks you how and why tell him exactly why. Tell him
that you invested in a unique device that is designed to
soft-press the shirt collar round thereby preventing the droopy
collar front. When you go on to tell him that this device cost
you $800, he will be sure that you are serious about trumping
your competitors.
But don’t stop there. Tell him that
you use a heating element (light bulb) that is unlikely to ever
burn out and that you have an elaborate setup designed to
assure that the cone is heated during all of the time that the
pressers are at work (a lamp timer). You want to be sure that
EVERY shirt gets the “treatment.”
Continuing, your prices are higher because
you are “over-equipped” so as to be absolutely
certain that you can always get the volume out. You could have
opted for “entry-level” equipment for $40,000, but
you couldn’t be sure that you’d always be able to
give the service, so you spent $65,000 instead. (Be sure that
your customer is sitting down during all of this, lest he fall
over).
But don’t stop there. Tell him that
you have two choices when it comes to starching shirts. One way
is just to buy a bag of powdered starch and shovel it into the
drum. Or you can buy a $7,000 machine that takes un-cooked
starch and turns it into a hot, creamy liquid and softly
injects it into the machine at precisely the right moment,
resulting in a fabulous finished product, second to none.
Or maybe you can tell your customer that
the guy across the street gets less for his shirts because he
is “just a dufus that doesn’t know his elbow from a
hole in the ground.”
Nah! I like my idea better. How’s
that for a New Year’s Resolution?
“If you do what you’ve always
done, you’ll get what you always got.”
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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