National Clothesline

What will you do with your suedes and leathers this autumn?

Every drycleaner must make the decision of what to do with the suedes and leathers your customers bring in for cleaning. The possible choices include the following:

1. Refuse to take them.

2. Take them and give them to others to do.

3. Take them and try to improve on the work others have done.

4. Do some of them yourself and give the rest to others to do.

5. Do all of them yourself.

There are benefits and drawbacks to each of these possible choices. For instance, if you decide to refuse to take in any suede or leather articles, you will lose the income and profits you could realize from some of the highest profit items that will come across your counter.

However, you sure won’t have any responsibility for them. Neither will you have any problems with them. However, you will be admitting that you are not a full-service cleaner and you may be sending your customers to a competitor who will take their leathers and perhaps their drycleaning as well

If you decide to take the suedes and leathers and send them to others to do them for you, then you will make some income from them. However, you will have to live with someone else ’s work and level of quality as well as someone else’s delivery time, which may not be up to the standards your customers have come to expect of you.

Furthermore, you will be the one the customer holds responsible for what happened to that valuable suede or leather garment.

If the wholesale work is good and the delivery time is short, then you are in good shape. If it is not good, then your customer will hold you responsible no matter who did the work.

Finally, to protect yourself, you must become as familiar with the types and peculiarities of the suedes and leathers you accept as you are familiar with the types and peculiarities of the cloth items you accept.

This will help you to avoid problems caused by misunderstandings resulting from lack of knowledge about suede and leather on your part and on the part of the customer when you accept their suedes and leathers and send them to others to do the work.

If you decide to try to improve on what others have done, you will be trying to improve the quality of the pressing by following simple instructions and learning techniques for safely forming and pressing suedes and leathers, then brighten and deepen the color of suede garments and trims and restore the shine to leather garments and trims.

This can be done by following easy instructions and using inexpensive products like Royaltone ’s Suede Nu neutral spray, which is applied to suedes with a hand sprayer to deepen and brighten the color instantly, and Ultra-Shine aerosol polish, which is applied to slick leathers from an aerosol to quickly restore shine.

Finally, if you accept suede and leather and want to do some or all of you own suede and leather cleaning, you will be rewarded by making up to ten times your cost or 1,000 percent profit on each item you clean and you will keep all the money you get for each item you do.

However, in order to successfully do some or all of your own suede and leather items, you will have to learn about the types and peculiarities of the skins from which they are made, just as you should if you send them to others to clean.

You will also have to become as familiar with the techniques of spotting, cleaning and pressing suede and leather as you are with spotting, cleaning and pressing cloth items like cotton, silk, wool and synthetic fibers.

If you use a system of leather cleaning like the Royaltone system, leather cleaning will be 90 percent like cloth cleaning. You will be able to spot, clean and press most suedes and leathers without color loss or getting involved with dyeing or painting.

However, if you also want to be able to restore torn, worn or faded suedes or leathers that may come across your counter already torn, worn or faded, you will also have to be sure you also learn how to mend, sew, spray and dye.

Regardless of who does the work, when you decide to accept suedes and leathers for cleaning, you automatically accept the responsibility for your customer ’s valuable suede and leather garments. Your customer will hold you responsible for whatever happens, good or bad. There is no free lunch.

You do not have the option to blindly and ignorantly accept your customer’s suede and leather garments with out also accepting responsibility. If you do so, you run the real risk of claims resulting from lack of knowledge.

For example, you could promise, or imply by not saying anything, that you can or will do something to a suede or leather garment that is not possible.

Accepting suede or leather is really no different from the way you accept cloth items.

For example, if you are ignorant, you could promise or imply by not saying anything, that badly sun bleached and rotted drapery linings will come through the drycleaning process without falling apart. They could fall apart and you could have a claim.

So what is the answer? You learned all you could about the types and peculiarities of cloth items made of wool, silk, cotton, linen and synthetic fibers, etc.

Therefore, begin by acquiring the same knowledge about suedes and leathers so that you can avoid the problems and claims that can result from improper acceptance procedures.

There are two ways to become familiar with the required techniques for accepting, spotting, classifying, cleaning, pressing, sewing, mending, spraying and promoting your own suedes and leathers. You can seek training by recognized experts at a school, take a correspondence course, get a DVD and a detailed instruction book, or buy product kits with detailed instructions.

Or you can go to the expensive school of hard knocks. Learning from the experts is faster, surer, safer and much less costly than the school of hard knocks.

So don’t experiment with your customers’ valuable garments and end up paying claims that can cost you many times more than the cost of becoming educated. Learn how to keep 100 percent of your suede and leather sales revenue. Learn how to simply and easily produce beautiful suedes and leathers for your customers in your plant with existing equipment