Okay, kids, lets talk about hardening of the institutional arteries for a moment, shall we? In business, it seems much of what any industry does is due to inertia – or in plain English “because that’s the way it’s always been done.” Let us turn our attention to the lowly clothing tag, for an example of inertia in action.
<p>Garment tags are generally made of nylon. Why? They weren’t ALWAYS made that way, because clothing tags date back to well before the invention of nylon. Prior to that, I suppose tags were made of silk, and nylon is a much cheaper substitute. From about the 1940s on, however, nylon garment tags have been the standard. </p><p>Know what happens to a garment tag when it’s pressed at a dry cleaners? The edges melt. They transmorgrify from supple nylon thread into hard melted plastic. They scratch. They poke. They annoy. And they are difficult to remove from the garment, without inadvertantly cutting the threads that bind them. In short, they are annoying as Hell. </p>
<p>Haynes, for one, broke from the inertia pack and has A Better Idea. Silkscreening.</p>
<p>If you’ve looked at T-Shirts lately, you’ll find that Haynes no longer uses the faux silk, nylon tags in their shirts. They simply silkscreen their logo and size info onto the yoke of the shirt. It’s fast, it’s efficient, and I’m willing to bet that it takes less time, labor, and money to screen a design onto the fabric than it does to sew a tag on. In short, it’s a brilliant solution. After all, once you’ve bought the right size shirt, I’m willing to bet that the tag becomes largely unneeded, not to mention unwanted. </p>
<p>So if there <em>is </em>a better way, and one major American manufacturer has adopted it, why hasn’t everybody don the same? </p>
<p>Inertia.</p>
<p>Simply put, they’ve always used tags. They’re used to it. They’ve built business models around the practice. It would mean more work, tooling up for silkscreening, instead of sewing – take the excuse of your choice. The insane thing is that by switching, they could make their customers happy, and save money in the long run. But that’s not the way most businesses think. </p>
<p>So…how about YOUR business? Are you willing to try something that you’ve never tried before to improve your product and your margins, simultaneously? Or are you willing to let inertia rule your business?</p>
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