Many apparel and shoe manufacturers use silica packets at the factory level and place small packets in poly bags or large packets in boxes. These packets are a desiccant to keep moisture from damaging your items. They assist to absorb the moisture and keep everything dry. If these are not used or used properly, moisture can remain in bags or boxes while the goods are being transported for short or long hauls. Without this protection, this moisture can cause mold and mildew resulting in smelly messy items.
What happened to one of our customers was a little strange. Upon receiving their finished coats from overseas, they realized that these silica packets caused major staining on some of the items. It seems that they had purchased defective packets that stained the units while they were on the water for 45 days.
Luckily, this issue was not present on every coat, but there were 8,600 units to look through. This customer immediately called the Darn It Apparel Inspection Team and sent us a few samples to review. Upon inspecting the samples, we found the staining to be quite severe but were able to use our spot cleaning solutions to get rid of them. After performing a few time studies on the inspection and cleaning processes, we were able to get the customer a price and quick turn time. They shipped all of the units to us the next day.
The customer had asked us to inspect and sort through all the units first to be able to ship all of the 1st quality back to them immediately as they had many orders against them. Upon completion of the inspection, our Apparel Repair team got to work. These stains were quite large and required quite a bit of spot cleaning time. Luckily, 95% of the units we attempted to clean were turned into first quality units. The customer was able to salvage about 8,000 units for sale.
All the cleaned units were placed into new polybags with NEW Silica Packets and new clean boxes, manifested and shipped back to the customer. The initial inspection took 3 days to complete and then the stain removal process took another 5 days. The customer was able to sell all the units in a timely manner.
