It’s always nice having a perfect fitting blouse for when you are headed to work or a night on the town. You put it on. The fabric feels great. The color and pattern look great, but something is wrong. The cuff is 3 times the size it should be and looks silly on you. What’s next?? You take the shirt off and head back to the store a few days later to return it.
What happens if you own that store chain, and you have 2,500 of these shirts with cuffs that are too big? You know that they are not going to fit anyone properly and they are all sitting in the stores on the racks. If people do buy them, they are probably all coming back in the form of returns.
You really have three choices. First, you could send them back to the factory overseas to get them fixed. In this case, you will miss the season completely and hope that the style will work next year. Second, you could discard them and take the total loss. Lastly, you could partner with a Quality Refurbishment company like Darn It! and get them fixed to the proper specifications and get them back onto the shelves.
In this case, this retailer chose the third option and called the Darn It! Apparel Repair team to help with this issue. This is not a simple task as cuff attachments are very labor intensive and repairs can be expensive.
The Darn It Team partnered with the customer’s tech design team to come up with the proper solution. After many iterations, it was concluded that a simple measure, cut and resew wouldn’t work. It took too long and was too expensive for this process. The best solution happened to be where we saved the cuff and pleated it four times to shrink the opening. Yes, we had to make different size templates, measure the cuff, mark it for the pleats and then sew them, but it was the most cost effective and timely solution.
Once complete, we measured the cuffs again to double check our work, trimmed any loose threads and re-folded and re-packaged each piece back into its original bag and box. The entire process took two weeks, and the customer was able to get the garments back into the stores and online to their customers in time for the season.
Call the Darn It! Inspection or Repair team today if you run into similar issues in your stores or warehouses.
