At Tibard we are used to dealing in extremes, from producing one jacket with a special pocket and trim to rolling out thousands of items to multiple sites in a short time frame. Recently, we had something completely off the scale for one of our newest customers..
At Tibard we are used to dealing in extremes, from producing one jacket with a special pocket and trim to rolling out thousands of items to multiple sites in a short time frame. Recently, we had something completely off the scale for one of our newest customers. After winning the business, we had the extreme task of manufacturing and rolling out 122,000 items of chef clothing to their 60 locations. What’s more is we had just 17 days to get it all in and just 60 days to make it. Here’s how we did it…
We aren’t going to go into too much detail about how we won the business however, we can tell you that with Tibard, it isn’t just about offering a low bottom line: we win on service, quality and price. We tailor our offering to restaurant groups to give them the right mix for their business and 9/10 we hit the mark. It’s not an easy thing to do either, we have over 35 years of experience in the industry and it is a testament to the service we provide that there are a large number of customers we have kept with us for that 35 year period.
After we won the business, it was time to handover the project to manufacturing, after all these are physical things that we are selling and with 122,000 garments to make, there was no time to spare! While we do make an awful lot of our clothing in the UK, in fact we make around 40,000 garments a month, there is no way we could handle the huge capacity of this order on shore. So for this order, a good proportion was made by our international manufacturing partners. While this may seem like an easy way to get things done, it is not always the case, the logistical challenge was far greater than if we made it ourselves in the UK. We had shipping routes to plan, manifests to produce and with the clock ticking, nothing could go wrong.
At the same time that manufacturing was taking place, we had to start thinking about how we prepare for the most important part of our offering; the laundry service. While we work with restaurant chains with far more than 60 sites, we have generally grown as those businesses grow; perhaps adding 10-15 new sites for each customer a year. Now we had 60 sites to prepare, add to our CRM systems, plan laundry days, routes and sub-contract to our laundry partners. A tough ask but one which we had been training for and working towards for the last 35 years.
Finally we get the news that the freighter has reached UK shores, now we have a shipping container full of chef clothing coming to our factory to join the thousands of items we had already made in Dukinfield. While this sounds like we were in the home stretch, we were as far away as ever – every single item needed our laundry label to be heat pressed into it. This label helps us keep track of which customer owns which items, jump forward many days later and we had successfully labelled every item.
The only stage left was to send the goods to the 60 restaurant sites across the UK, which is several thousand miles of travelling all told. For Tibard though, the real task has only just begun, its about getting things right for our customer for the next 18 days, and then next 18 days, and then next 18 days …