Holy Sweatshirt!!
Garments with holes can certainly be in fashion. Ripped jeans are a great example of that. When it comes to sweatshirts, it may be a different story. Small holes in different parts of your sweatshirt may make the sweatshirt look old and defective.
Garments with holes can certainly be in fashion. Ripped jeans are a great example of that. When it comes to sweatshirts, it may be a different story. Small holes in different parts of your sweatshirt may make the sweatshirt look old and defective.
One US retailer received a large shipment of 14,000 crew neck sweatshirts this past fall and found small holes when performing their initial audit. They were uncomfortable placing these on the shelves at the time, so they called the Darn It Apparel Repair Team to help.
Our initial thought was that we would just perform a visual inspection and be able to sort the good from the bad and get the customer the first quality units back quickly. The customer had another idea. They really needed these sweatshirts for a specific customer and asked us if we could hand sew the small holes from the inside so that the customer wouldn’t see that it was repaired.
Luckily, these holes were extremely small, so we then performed a few time studies on hand sewing of the holes. We then gave the customer a price and turn time which was a little longer now due to the labor involved in hand sewing.
Of the 14,000 units, we found approximately 4,500 with holes that could be repaired. There were unfortunately, about 1,500 units with holes too large for repair. Once the inspection and repair were completed, we re-bagged and re-boxed the first quality units into their original cartons and sent them back to the customer for sale. The customer allowed us to give the damaged units to a local charity for Christmas.
Don’t give up when you see little holes in your garments. Partner with the Darn It Apparel Inspection and Apparel Repair teams. Let us help you.
