Sunday morning conference calls...

I had an early morning conference call with my supply chain partner.  His schedule is crazy, in part because of his success.  With almost 20 years of menswear industry experience behind him, over the past 7 years he's built one of the world's most profitable custom clothing operations.  When he's not overseas, he's zigzagging across the US meeting his suppliers and partners and clients.  So I managed to nail him down 6:00 am to 7:30 am, Sunday morning.  He had a couple free hours before heading off to church.

We worked out a bunch of details.  We talked packaging.  Focus on hangers, is his advice:  it's the one piece of packaging that the customer actually holds onto.  I was thinking about designing some nifty bags and boxes.  'You could do that,' he said, in the amused tone of one who's been down this road before, 'but really your customers will say 'mmm, nice box,' and then throw it away.

A couple years ago, he spent almost $10,000 on some nifty fabric boxes for his wholesale clients.  He spent a ton of time developing them into nice-looking and convenient storage and display devices.  None of his clients used them.  In the end, he trashed them all because they were taking up needed space in his warehouse.  

But hangers.  Give your customers a good hanger they can appreciate, and you'll have an advertisement in their closet forever.  In the US, the two best hanger suppliers to the clothing industry apparently are Beverly Hangers and Robert Carlton.  (This is why it's great to have an experienced sourcing partner.  They have all this essential industry awareness floating around in their brains, and I can just skim it up fast, for free.)  Beverly has the pre-eminent reputation, but his experience is Robert Carlton offers better service.  So we'll start there.

For suit bags he's putting me in touch with Basic Bags, a Manhattan manufacturer.  They're so specialist, I can't even find the website.  

One minor snag we've hit is shirt fabrics.  He was expecting to have a large inventory of shirt fabrics for me by now.  But it turned out that one of his suppliers gave him a bad shipment and the cottons were 'defective'.  

I didn't know that cotton fabric can be 'defective'.  It seems like the function of a piece of cloth is pretty hard to get wrong.  I don't think I could tell the difference between cloth that works and cloth that doesn't.  

Again, that's why he's the perfect partner.  Because his wholesale clients CAN tell the difference, and because they expect his garments to meet a luxury standard, he has to protect his supply chain against just these sorts of quality issues.  It's one of the free benefits of partnering with someone who already has a large and demanding client base.

He didn't go into specifics about the problem, but he didn't have to.  'Basically, it's not up to the standard that we require,' he summarized.  

So we're looking at a couple short-term solutions.  He'll be in Manhattan next week, and one of his suppliers there has an extensive inventory of 500 or so high-grade shirt fabrics.  That will give Moniker something to work with while he works out a more permanent solution.