National Clothesline

Around the holiday season, it is an appropriate time to write a wish list.

My wish list is for things that don’t exist but yet sound to me like plausible inventions. These are products or modifications that would help those in the shirt business and/or improve the product. I wish to extend my apologies to those who may actually be producing the products that I pine for. If they exist and I don’t know about them, perhaps a more boisterous marketing plan is in order.

When I ran and owned a shirt plant, I guess that I hated folded shirts as much as you do. We would cringe at the sight of a freshly pressed shirt that needed to be folded, not only for the extra time that was needed, but also we always felt like we were surely about to ruin the press job.

I believe that we did. In spite of valiant efforts to avoid it, it seems impossible to prevent neat folds from turning into horrific scrunches.

For years now, I have been on the consumer side of the folded shirt and I don’t like what I get. No, I don’t need to impress someone in a board room, but my business is shirts and therefore mine is expected to be top-notch.

The way that shirts are folded using currently available equipment and packaging is unacceptable. So, the first item on my wish list is some sort of packaging that would protect a folded shirt from looking lousy when it is unfolded.

Maybe this would include lightweight cardboard that would fit into the sleeves that would prevent unsightly folds in the sleeves. Perhaps we would also have a very durable collar support that would stand up to the cramped quarters of a suitcase. If the plastic bag that contains the shirt fit more snugly, lightweight shirts would not slip and partially unfold. Maybe a self-adhesive strip that allowed one to tighten the width of the bag after the shirt is in it would help.

As a business traveler, I want to open up a folded shirt and see one that looks “hot off the press.” Do you think that this is possible?

Back in the days when folded shirts were far more common, in fact all shirts were folded, a three-piece shirt unit actually consisted of five pieces of equipment: A sleeve press, a collar and cuff press, a body press, a folding machine and, the most obscure, a machine that stored a stack of shirt boards.

With each press of the pedal on the folding machine, this machine would separate one shirt board from the stack, making it easy for the operator to select exactly one shirt board.

I want something like that for hangers. Tangled hangers can drive anybody bonkers. Wouldn’t it be great if your presser could consistently grab a hanger from the rail and it didn’t get tangled with the next two or three? I bet this would increase productivity 5 percent by itself. I can’t even imagine the contraption necessary to make this wish come true, but I want this!

How about a shirt press that has a buck that is at a better working height for shorter pressers? I think there should be a hydraulic adjustment that will raise or lower a buck to best suit the operator. This will result in less fatigue and better production.

This doesn’t sound like something that would be that hard to do. Would it be expensive? Who knows? I’m not engineering today, I’m dreaming.

And while we’re on the subject of shirt units, manufacturers have found a way to accommodate a wide variety of shirt sizes by using side expanders and air bags. Sometimes the shirt is molded to fit the shape of the steam chests, like what Unipress and numerous other manufacturers do. Other times the steam chests are flat (like Ajax) and different parts of the shirt are pressed in different ways.

What never changes on any shirt unit is the size of the collar block. It is the same size whether you are pressing a size 14 or a size 22 and everything in between. This means that the shirts can not fit the buck the same way. Some need to be overlapped, some not.

Maybe different size shirts would fit better and press more perfectly if the collar block expanded somehow like on a shirt folding machine. Or maybe the shoulders expand like on a suzy.

This next item on my wish list actually does exist, but it has little or no presence in this country. Several years ago, maybe even ten years ago, the Japanese invented a shirt buttonhole tag that didn’t need a staple. They were self-adhesive. I think that, provided the cost is in line with today’s tags, these tags would play a big role.

I sometimes work at a plant that has a customer base that expects the sleeves on every shirt to be creased. I find creased sleeves to be rather distasteful but the customers have come to expect it and therefore the cleaner has no choice but to offer shirts this way.

The touch-up person must dutifully hand iron a sharp crease into each and every sleeve. What is particularly hazardous about this is that other parts of the shirt that truly need touch up are neglected for the sake of “staying caught up.” This is particularly distasteful — failing to remove errant creases, and instead adding more.

Still, a hand-finished-looking shirt is probably the root cause of creasing sleeves. It does suggest “attention to detail.”

So, my personal feelings aside, sometimes you need to crease sleeves. How about a sleever press that, at the flick of a switch, will allow the operator to crease a sleeve?

Maybe the machine is designed to have the steam heads very close together so that, by default, the sleeves are creased. But if you snap a switch, a gadget makes its way between the heads before they close and now the heads don’t pinch the sleeve anymore. Now the inspector can concentrate on more important things than creasing sleeves.

I can remember a time when all I wanted for Christmas was my two front teeth.