A men’s retailer sent us 1,200 shirts with the wrong main label sewn in them. The job was simple enough: remove the incorrect label, replace it with the right one, send them back.
So, we started pulling labels.
And almost immediately, Emily’s team noticed something that wasn’t part of the job. The size printed on the label inside the garment didn’t match the size printed on the polybag it had been sealed in. One said one thing, the bag said another.
That alone was worth a phone call. A customer who orders a large and receives something else sends it back, and the retailer absorbs the cost of a return that never should have happened.
But the closer we looked, the clearer it became that this wasn’t a labeling mix-up. The sizing was wrong. The factory had never put the correct sizes into the garments in the first place.
Which left everyone in an unusual position. Nobody actually knew what size those 1,200 shirts were. Not the retailer who ordered them. Not us. Not the factory that made them. The only size information in existence was printed on labels that were demonstrably incorrect.
We called the retailer, explained what we’d found, and they approved expanding the job immediately — because the alternative was shipping 1,200 shirts of unknown size to their customers.
There’s one way to solve a problem like that, and it isn’t elegant. You measure.
Our team measured each garment at several points to determine its true size. Then the correct size label went into the back neck, the new main label went in behind it, and the polybag sticker on the outside was corrected to match. Twelve hundred times. The whole project took six days.
Emily started at Darn It! as an inspector in 2002. Twenty-four years later she’s a Lead on our floor, auditing the work our inspectors do and teaching them the right method for each customer’s specification — which is exactly what a job like this needs, because the method here wasn’t on any work order.
We were hired to swap a label. What we actually did was tell a retailer what they’d bought.
“Your Problem Is Our Business”
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