Pre Retailing… Get it Right!

The role of ‘pre-retail’ work in the fashion sector today may not be glamour but it sure is important and can cost a company dearly if it’s not done correctly.

Although pre-retailing is a not a new concept as the recession grips all costs needs to be assessed to keep margins to a maximum.

Pre retailing is what happens to the garment before it hits the high street or web consumer. It’s all the processing and packaging that takes place to ensure that each garment is sitting on a rail neat and ready to sell. It’s particularly important for flat packed imported goods which will require:

• Steaming

• Pressing

• Hanging

• Cubing

• Labelling

• Pricing – swing ticket attachment

• Bagging

• Sorting into Ratio Packs

• Delivery booking in and arrival at supplier warehouse.

Pre retailing can also include 10% inspections to ensure that the bulk production corresponds to the seals submitted to the buyer and if that 10% inspection does show a fault or quality control problem a 100% inspection can be raised.

If pre retailing doesn’t affectively occur and a delivery is submitted into the buyer’s warehouse or National Distribution Centre and then inspected hold on to your hat…you are seriously going to get clobbered with quality fines and worst case scenario the entire order will be rejected.

Often these costly mistakes are oversights from designers and suppliers who have an over simplistic view of the role of pre retailing. I have been here myself – when I owned a design and manufacturing company called Retro UK we so! 80 pence (compared to a price in the UK of 3.75 – I seriously thought this was it the good times are going to roll!

How wrong I was. Despite having 3 quality control visits (that were not cost in hence pushing up the price point even more) the manufacturer decided to smuggle the rejects into the main order – a 10% inspection was instigated and discovered the sharp practices.

Of course we screamed and shouted at the manufacturer but we got absolutely nowhere at all. We had paid in advance of the shipment and there was no resource whatsoever.

The full inspection cost one pound per garment, then there was the cost of relabelling, re sorting, re ratios – you name it we had to do it. It cost a fortune and we were late on delivery due to all the work that had to be undertaken. We then had a 10% cost price reduction for late delivery.

However without pre retailing activity the errors would not have been foreseen and the result would have been a cancellation.

You have to achieve a careful balance within the supply chain of really understanding where the true costs are in making orders – for the larger producer its a complex global logistics process and every step of the journey costs money and time. You have to keep reviewing value and each of the individual processes because if careful attention is not applied you will lose money and orders.

As for my previous label we learnt the hard way….we submitted the orders late, lost money of half the order, there was insufficient selling time for our garments to sell and next season our orders were reduced to such an extent we couldn’t supply out of Lithuania again. Needless to say the following season we had the account closed by AIS.

So understand your supply chain process and carefully review where the costs of the supply chain are, each operation such as pressing and labelling all costs money. Get that Excel spreadsheet and review each and every cost before you say “yes” to that all important bulk order.

By Jenny Holloway