Most uniform orders arrive late for the same reason: somebody sent a list of names instead of letting us measure a size run.
We make uniforms for about nine schools and a dozen shops and offices a year, and the orders that go wrong go wrong in the same way every time. Somebody sends a spreadsheet of names with a chest measurement beside each one, and asks for a hundred garments cut to those numbers.
Here is why that fails. A hundred individual measurements means a hundred cutting operations, and cutting is where the time in a uniform order actually goes. It also means a hundred chances for a number that was written down wrong, and a number written down wrong is not discovered until the garment is on the person. What arrives is ninety garments that fit and ten that do not, in the week when the term is starting, and now there is a second week of alterations nobody planned for.
The better way takes one afternoon. We come to you, or you send everybody to us, and we measure every person in one sitting. From that spread we build five sizes, and we make the two or three people at each extreme individually. Five sizes is nine cutting operations. The whole order is then cut in a day instead of a week, and every garment has been cut from a pattern that was checked rather than from a number somebody typed.
The second thing that saves a week is the sample. One garment, made properly, worn by somebody who will wear it every day, for a whole working day. Not held up against them in the shop. This is where the useful complaints come out: a pocket that sits under a belt, a collar that will not sit flat with a lanyard, a skirt length that is wrong for sitting on the floor with small children. All of those are free to fix on a sample and expensive to fix on a hundred garments.
Third, agree what happens to the garments that do not fit. Even a good size run leaves five or six per cent needing an alteration, and it is better to have agreed in advance that those are done free in the first month than to argue about it in the first week of term.
And lastly, the calendar. We stop taking new uniform work three weeks before a school term starts. That is not us being difficult. It is because the schools that booked during the holidays are in those weeks, and a fourth order squeezed in makes all four late instead of one.
