ReEvaluate

There has been a magic formula in this industry that was never as widespread as it should have been.  I’m going to share it with you, and then I’m going to explain why it is no longer prevalent.  Firstly, not many people were truly aware of it, which is unfortunate.  Secondly, let’s see if we can make this new formula one to live by.

In days gone by, I used to say:

There is some poetry to this business.  Given 100 drycleaning pieces, 40 of them are pants and 60 of them are not.  This means that in a plant that is properly equipped, you will have one pants station [a legger press and an automatic topper], and two fully equipped utility stations [each with a utility press and a shared 3-head topper and a shared multi-function form].  The presser at the pants station presses 40 pants per hour and each presser at the utility press will press at the rate of 30 pieces per hour.   This is a neat 100 pieces per hour with 3 pressers.

You can add shirts to that mix neatly as well:

With the addition of 2 single-buck shirt units, each producing 50 shirts per hour, an additional 100 pieces per hour are added to the mix.

This was a right formula that worked very well for a long time.  Admittedly, only the most efficient plants ran with this formula as their daily mantra, but if you succeeded at attaining those goals, you ran the most profitable plant possible. 

Over the years, I have said many times that you must constantly evaluate and re-evaluate what you do to determine if what you’re doing is still relevant.  It is certainly time to look at this.

For years, I have said that we do 40% pants.  Many dismissed that immediately, certain that they did far more than 40%.  But when challenged – thanks to the ability to mine data – their number would be right on.  Rarely did the percentage deviate more than  1%. 

Where have the pants gone?  Nowhere.  They’re still here.

Years ago, we could reliably count on a 50/50 mix of shirts and drycleaning.  That was decades ago.  In fact, if your shirt count started to dwarf your drycleaning count, it spelled trouble.  This was because 30-40 years ago, drycleaners priced their shirts as a “loss leader”, something that surely baffles drycleaners today.  Then, drycleaning services became less of a priority for consumers and those pieces began an aggressive decline.  But shirt service is more difficult to duplicate at home and is a bit of an addictive service.  Shirt numbers outpaced drycleaning piece counts.  When public smoking was eliminated virtually nationwide, clothing became ‘re-wearable’ and drycleaners felt the pinch.  Shirts are liable to absorb perspiration, but a dress or a sport jacket can hang in the closet and circumvent a trip to the drycleaner.

But where are the pants?  It’s not that they are missing, it’s that there are more utility pieces (non-pants) than there used to be in that group of 100 pieces of drycleaning.  Many shirts – many – are now drycleaning pieces.  Shirts with spandex.  Shirts with snaps.  Shirts with thick buttons.  Shirts that cost $400-$500.  Shirts by Robert Graham and similar labels.  Correct or not, many of us are taking these are drycleaning them and finishing them on a drycleaning utility press.

This does three things:  1) It makes the percentage of pants lower by increasing the number of utility pieces, 2) It makes the percentage of shirts appear to be lower.  The number of shirts may be roughly the same, but the number of laundered shirts is less and, 3)  the percentage of pants will be a smaller number.

So, what does this all mean?  It means that you need to take a fairly large sampling of your total pieces and see what it tells you.  It is very likely that your mix of pressers and equipment is no longer valid.  For example, it’s possible that your shirt presser used to come in at the same time as your drycleaning pressers, but that is no longer necessary.  It could be that the shirt presser finishes with the other pressers because that is what they’ve always done.  Perhaps they should be starting a half hour later.  If you’ve long had 3 utility pressers and 2 pants pressers – because you always have – now you only need one pants presser.

One thing is certain:  What used to be true, you will find is no longer true.  Watch.