You guys rock!

Marguerite

I’m having a hard time getting my head around how you can cut to order and have 24-48 hour turn around. I mean if you get 1 of a whole bunch of things, then you’re basically cutting 1-offs and sewing them, so how can you do that in 24-48 hours?

We don’t cut every single piece every time someone orders. We keep a thin inventory of pieces on hand for many styles. The website knows how much we have in stock and won’t allow customers to order something if it doesn’t think we’ve got it.

For other styles, we keep pieces partially complete. For example, on the pants that you ordered, a barcode printed out this morning which instructed the cutter to pull a partially completed pant shell + waistband and send it to the sewing room. The waistband was sewn on, the legs hemmed, and then it was cleaned, bagged and put out for shipping.

I’m not expecting an answer, and I don’t what to hijack this thread. Mostly I’m just impressed with what you’ve done.

I’m not at this level right now, and I can just put galleries/boutiques into my production line and let them know individually how far out they’ll have to wait.

But to promise as many orders as come in that they’ll ship in 24-48 hours…wow, you amaze me.

I wish I lived near Houston and wasn’t already booked on your tour day because this is fascinating to me!

Marguerite

Marguerite, they’re *lean*. They don’t anticipate demand, they cut to order. That’s the whole point. You order, they cut, sew and ship in 24-48 hours and it’s amazing because they have over 160 skus. They have a small buffer of stock (less than 5pcs) per style in the same way a restaurant has tomato stock and preps for the day’s customers based on daily demand. They never have to discount excess because there isn’t any.

We actually have over 1000 SKUs now and rising.

Kathleen is correct in that we don’t really try to forecast demand. When we launch a new style, we make a small set of inventory and then just wait and see. We have a little in-house application that keeps track of how much of something we have in stock and how fast its been moving over the last month. Based on those rankings, we decide what to cut more or less on a daily basis.

On some styles, we keep a small set of semi-finished garments in stock and then complete them individually as the orders come in. On others, we maintain as small an inventory as we think we can get away with.

Kathleen is also correct that we don’t try to discount excess. If we have a style that doesn’t move well, we just let its remaining inventory sell out and then take it off the website. Everything eventually sells and part of our business strategy is to maintain our price points. (Discounts have amounted to less than 2.5% of our gross this year, the vast majority of which have been loyalty discounts to existing customers.)

One of the goals of going to TSS is to allow us to sew ever smaller runs of clothing, perhaps eventually getting to a zero inventory situation. The America’s 21st folks have definitely been advising that we go that route. The gating factor right now for that is cutting – our line can handle short runs fairly well, but our cutting cannot. At some point, we’ll have to invest in auto-cutting infrastructure – perhaps next year. Even auto-cutting won’t completely solve the problem – I think there are some technology hurdles that have to be overcome.

Right now, my inventory room has far more goods in it than I’m comfortable with. Part of that is because of the seasonality of our business. November through May are far busier than June through September. Even with letting our people take their paid vacations in the summer and giving them extra days of paid furlough, we still had too much capacity.

In the busy season, we’ll be slightly under – but we think that we’ll be at nearly perfect capacity for 2008’s slow season and then we can put in a second mod for the 2008-2009 busy season. We’ll have workers to staff that line only for the busy months.

Shipping time is 24-48 hours. How you can anticipate demand and guarantee that shipping time? Are you doing push manufacturing? What happens with excess? I guess it goes on sale!

So, in conclusion, thank you for taking the time to write on this board and answer questions when people like me are waiting for their pants!!

Marguerite