Many of us in the Northeast experienced a once in a lifetime cold snap for weather a few weeks ago. Many of our homes had water damage from pipes bursting. We had plenty of damage to interior walls, floors, and cabinets. But what happens when a sprinkler pipe bursts in your main warehouse right above your new stock that just arrived a few days ago. You just unloaded the trucks onto new pallets and were preparing to put the stock away. When you arrived the next morning, all you could see were soaking wet cartons.
What do you do now? You try to open the cartons and the cardboard falls apart in your hands. What a mess. One choice is to call your insurance company as you are certainly covered for this type of issue. They may have you wait a few days for them to get there for inspection. Waiting sometimes is not the best idea. Letting water continue to soak the garments will continue to do more damage. At this point, you may have to trash all the goods and just collect the insurance money. What your left with are disappointed customers.
Your other choice is to call the insurance company and let them know that you are sending the wet pallets to the Darn It! Apparel Inspection Team for remediation. You are covered for this as well and the insurance company would be thrilled to pay for this process instead of the full cost of the goods. This is exactly what this men’s retailer did.
Darn It! received the 12 soaking wet pallets the next day after the mess was realized and got to work. The first task was to immediately remove the pants from the poly bags, remove the trims and cardboard. Next, we hung all 5,400 pants on racks to dry. We needed to inspect each pair but couldn’t do that while wet.
About 24 hours later, The Apparel Inspection Team performed a full inspection of each pair to see if there any water stains or other damage. The units with staining were then laundered and steamed back into first quality shape. The balance of the goods were placed in one of our two ozone chambers overnight to be eliminate the chance that there were any mold spores festering. Once all of the units were refurbished, the team then performed one final inspection while adding the new hangtags and button bags to the pants.
The pants were bagged into new polybags with proper barcoding, boxes, manifested and sent back to the customer like nothing happened just a few days after the accident. Don’t wait. Call Darn It to help with problems like this and many others.
