What happens when your zipper gets stuck? Hopefully nothing got stuck in the process. But I guess you would get very frustrated. You would try and try to zip it up and down with no avail. You pull at the fabric, you pull at the zipper pull. Nothing.
What if you had 43,000 sweatshirts that had zippers that were stuck and wouldn’t move comfortably in either direction? What if these sweatshirts were to be on the front page of your fall launch on your web site? What do you do now so that you don’t lose over 2 million dollars in sales?
One of our customers came to the Darn It Apparel Repair Team and asked us for help. It took no time to realize that the main problem with these zippers was that they were made with the wrong slider. The slider is the part attached to the zipper pull that moves up and down on the zipper teeth. We know that this wasn’t going to be an easy task, but we told our customer that if they wanted to salvage these sweatshirts, that we needed to replace the slider and pull completely with the proper one that matches the teeth.
Luckily, the zipper company partnered with our customer and quickly molded 50,000 new sliders in China and shipped them to us in just a few weeks along with some tools we needed to replace them. In the meantime, we were able to receive the garments and prepare them for the new slider. We had to remove the stopper on one side so that we could remove the wrong slide. Once the new parts came in, we were able to slide on the new zipper slider, add a new stopper with a crimping tool and then test the slider by opening and closing the zipper.
Once the repaired sweatshirts had been tested, re-inspected, and re-packaged, we were able to ship all 43,000 pieces back to our customer. This apparel repair project was extremely difficult and time consuming. It required eight straight days of work, but in the end, with the cooperation of our customer and their vendor, the sweatshirts started shipping out to their customers the next day.
Your Problem Is Our Business.
