Consider the true cost of information, or the lack thereof, to you and to your business. Let’s look at an easy example. A customer ordered 24 shirts, and something went awry with the job. It does not matter if it is the result of the wrong information, simple human error, lack of communication, poor quality product or poor quality decoration – whatever. You are at a point where you are likely to lose the order, lose the customer or lose the contract decorator. You now have choices to make – to eat the order, replace the order, replace the order and work with the same decorator, replace the order and work with a new decorator or some other option.
Look at the situation with a “big picture” frame of mind, rather than getting bogged down into the blame game. What will resolve the situation, with the least amount of money lost and the least amount of conflict between you and your customer, if you want to continue to do business with that customer? And quite frankly, there are some customers that you might decide to not maintain. Something else to consider is if the relationship with your contract embroiderer is a relationship that will be harder to replace, and more important to the overall health of your business. Unfortunately, you may be stuck between these two – your customer and your contractor. Take the time to evaluate the situation for the good of your business and proceed towards a solution with that in mind.
If you find that you are dealing with orders that go sideways with any frequency, it is time to take a close look at your process to see why things are not going as they should. Review the process of taking orders and for passing that information on to your contract embroiderer. If you can determine where in that process things are getting muddled, you can eliminate the root cause of the errors and make your life, and the life of your decorator, better and more profitable.
There are a few steps in the process of ordering decorated apparel that tend to get fouled up. Assumptions are nobody’s friend when it comes to apparel decorating! By making sure you provide all the key pieces of information properly and consistently with every order, it is likely that you will avoid costly errors or delays.
Your contract embroiderer needs all of the following information in writing (preferably by keyboard, not handwritten) to complete your job:
- Product details – how many of what items, in what sizes and colorways
- When the goods will be arriving, from what supplier, and if there are any back orders that will be arriving at another time
- Design – useable, finished artwork or good quality digitized file
- Design size (per product)
- Design placement (per product) – be specific if the garment has pockets
- Design colors (per product) – PMS colors or thread colors
- Personalization details
- Is an image or sewout required for approval by you or by your customer, or not
- Upon completion instructions – drop ship, blind ship, pickup, delivery, bulk folded, individually folded, bagged and tagged per individual
- Production deadline and/or in-hand to customer date
And if the order contains more than one kind of product, or different colors of the products, the decorator will need the information above for each of these products or colorways. There is nothing so frustrating as getting back an order of multiple products only to discover they were all embroidered with the same thread colors, even though the shirts colors were different. How would the decorator know you expected him or her to reverse the thread colors on the dark shirts, unless you specified that when you placed the order?
If you have more than one person taking orders from customers, it becomes all the more important that you standardize how you collect and then pass along the order details from your business to your embroidery professional. As the number of people involved increases, so does the potential for errors. The bigger your organization is, the more important it becomes to have a system in place that helps you collect and track information in a standardized way.
When you eliminate uncertainty, you eliminate assumptions and you eliminate waste and loss. Waste is expensive in many ways. It causes personal strife between you and your team, you and your customer, or you and your embroidery professional. It can cause your reputation to suffer, costing you repeat work from a specific customer and future orders from folks they know. It can cost you credibility. And the lost time for you, your customer and your contractor is not recoverable. By standardizing how you take orders from your apparel customers and how you share that information with your contract decorators, you can minimize all the out-of-pocket and hidden costs of waste.
Jennifer Cox is president of the National Network of Embroidery Professionals. NNEP members receive personalized marketing consulting designed specifically for their business. To join NNEP today, visit NNEP.net, email Jennifer at hooper@nnep.net, or call 800-866-7396.