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Our clients often ask us about if Greco Apparel manufactures scrubs for the medical industry so we wanted to record a short video to explain the types of scrubs we make for the medical industry such as doctors, nurses and lab technicians.

Fit and design are important. There is more stretch material being used today to give comfort to doctor or nurse as they perform their jobs. The downside of having fabric with more stretch, is that the garments are less likely to hold up to higher temperature washings.

Typically hospitals will wash scrubs and lab coats at 150 degrees temperature compared with about 100 degrees washing temperature for normal clothes washed at home.

There are also more details on scrubs lab coats today with the inclusion of technology in the medical practice. This means both lab coats and scrubs will sometimes have places to hold cell phones and ipads.

Call us at 215-628-2557 if you have questions about manufacturing scrubs.

Why is supplying the uniform industry different than manufacturing for the retail trade and why is this business attractive to me? Manufacturing uniforms for the US Army during the Korean Conflict is how my present day company was founded by my father who had been an inspector for the Quartermaster as the Defense Logistics Agency was then known. He knew how to successfully bid contracts and produce profitably for the military. When that war ended and government uniform contracts dried up he made the transition to ‘civilian’ clothing. That put us in the realm as a contractor for manufacturers selling to retail.

That change to the civilian markets kept us busy for years producing for the nation’s largest manufactures. And then in the 90’s I had more than 80% of my business with one retail chain, a public company. I made men’s suits and a few years later, this major client declared bankruptcy. Losing money and a major customer is quite an experience from a vendor perspective and one I trust you have avoided. What made supplying retailers so risky and what does the uniform industry offer as an alternative?

As a manufacturer, unless you sell a ‘must have’ brand name, such as Ralph Lauren, you are probably at the mercy of the retailer’s demands for continually lower prices. Buyers at retail are incentivized to purchase at the lowest cost, not necessarily to add the best overall value to the bottom line. If the retailer did not make their numbers in a given year, a request for help with “mark-down” money came as no surprise to the vendor. Pay up or jeopardize future business. This mode of business did not fit my personality or my sense of good judgment.

After the customer bankruptcy is when I devoted my efforts to the uniform business. The uniform industry provided the opportunity to manufacture garments and deal with a reasonable customer, one who will pay for what they order and appreciate and continually develop a healthy vendor relationship. The driving motivation for uniform buyers is not typically the lowest cost as would be in retail. Yes, prices have to be competitive but reliability and performance is quintessential. Why did my personality not mesh with serving the vagaries of the fashion industry?

Not many of us enjoy paying the same price twice. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice; well we better get some useful knowledge. My antennae are usually up for self-improvement and keys to solve issues based on lapses of competency that I didn’t know I had. Luckily I came across Give and Take written by Adam Grant Ph.D. professor from Wharton. Grant reveals an approach to identifying three common reciprocal behavior styles. He explains the benefits and pitfalls to help us catapult our success and avoid disastrous outcomes. I will share with you the principles of the concept along with a personal story of a business failure directly related to lack of awareness of these insights.

The three styles are givers, takers and matchers. We learn how these styles impact success or lack of it. Grant notes that “success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. Givers foster an opportunity to make a difference in the domains of networking, collaborating, evaluating and influencing.” There is no one behavior for all situations but there are dominant styles to which we default. “Givers are ‘other-focused’ and tend to give more than they get while paying attention to what others want from them.” Givers put other’s best interest ahead of their own.” In a zero sum game giving rarely pays off but most of life is not zero sum.” We can be creative and increase the available pie.

Take advantage of existing and accessible human capital of others to be able to connect to their contacts and determine how you can be helped. When the roles are reversed you have little idea how someone else can help you and you must ask. One of the value added tasks is to ‘reconnect’ with people and reactivate dormant ties.” You have already built credibility and trust which would enable the relationship to get re-established quickly.

“Givers are much more comfortable expressing vulnerability; they’re interested in helping others, not gaining power over them, so they’re not afraid to expose chinks in the armor.” People will feel more comfortable dealing with someone not afraid to exhibit normal human personality traits. The most successful sales people are expert at asking questions and listening to their clients. Challenge yourself to listen twice as much as you speak. You only learn when another talks.

Beware though. Givers can wind up on the bottom by becoming doormats or pushovers. The key is to be sure to take care of yourself interspersed with your efforts to help others.
“Takers tend to be self-centered by first evaluating what others can offer them. A taker will help other people strategically when the benefits outweigh the costs. Clues to recognizing takers include “characteristics of being more self-promoting, self-absorbed and self-important. When your relationships and reputations are visible to the world, it is harder to achieve sustainable success as a taker. Takers tend to worry that revealing weaknesses will compromise their dominance and authority.”

Few people are purely givers or takers. We tend to become matchers by attempting to establish an equal balance of giving and getting. We find that “most people are matchers as their core values emphasize fairness, equality and reciprocity.” Reid Hoffman, founder of Linked In said, “If you insist on quid pro quo every time your help others you will have a much narrower network.”

My dominant style is a giver and here’s how I got in trouble from lack of knowledge of this reciprocal system. About ten years ago I was producing work clothing for a client in a startup business. After a couple years, my client found himself to be undercapitalized. Motivated as a giver help to this client, I extended credit terms beyond a rational point. The client was a taker and I allowed myself to be duped. My inclination to act as a giver blinded me to properly assess the risk at hand. I lost money and the client went out of business. Neither the image apparel or retail markets are without risk. I just prefer working with clients who value my service when I deliver as promised, independent of the risks they assume with their customers as is common in retail.

After reading about this approach, I reminded myself of the Rabbi Hillel’s questions: “If I am not for myself then who will be? If I am only for myself then what am I? And if not now, when?” The lessons learned from this book will help you to both avoid detrimental errors in judgment and support greater success than you can imagine.

As seen in Made to Measure magazine by Joseph B. Greco MSOD January 12, 2014

http://www.madetomeasuremag.com/madetomeasurespringsummer2014/index.html

Pages 76-81

“It’s not about shoes, it’s about customer service.” Says Zappos founder, Tony Hsieh. In a recent television interview about this dynamic mail order shoe company, sold recently to Amazon for $1.5 billion, we learn one lesson of success. Zappos customer service representatives are given the power to do whatever is necessary to make customers happy. One scene showed a rep speaking to a customer and going onto the Internet with her to locate a pair of shoes she had seen somewhere. We were told that the record for time spent on a customer service call was five and one half hours. While initially this seems to be an unbelievable amount of time think about the cost benefit relationship.

Even at $35/ hour including taxes and overhead for a total expenditure I estimate a cost at less than $400 for this allotted time. That’s the cost for the 5 ½ hour call but what might that investment be worth? If Zappos kept that customer for life they would easily profit from future sales. I am sure the customer shared this service story with many friends and positive referrals are always beneficial. Further I am now sharing the story with thousands of UniformMarket readers. So for their $400 investment I think Zappos got thousands worth of publicity. All the return on investment because of the culture of service set by the company founder.

We hear about these tremendous success stories even in these times of negative economic news. Fed Chairman Bernanke foretold more months if not years of anemic growth due to our rather severe downturn. Retail clothing sales were down an unexpected 1.2% in May. High unemployment lingers. Natural disasters such as the gulf oil spill will crimp the future of wildlife, cost billions and take years to clean up while visiting economic havoc on our neighbors in the South.

There’s enough negative news to satisfy most fatalists. The more we study history or have lived it, we realize there have been other challenging times. World population continues to grow and all those people are consumer of goods and services. So how do we reconcile the disparity between opportunity and hard economic times? You may not be able to resolve this issue but we can improve our performance and results. When my golf swing goes awry, the professionals advise reviewing the fundamentals first. Checking one’s posture, grip and alignment will usually reveal some facet of the mechanics that may have strayed out of line.

Which fundamentals in business can we search to check the mechanics of our success? Given the fundamentals are not new, there must be good reason for the longevity of age old wisdom. I turned to the classic work of Napoleon Hill and his 1937 book “Think and Grow Rich.” If you have not read it now is the time and if you have read it there’s no time like the present to review it. As with improving a golf swing, attention paid to just a few points will account for major improvement opportunity. (Pareto’s Principle known as the 80/20 rule is another proven fundamental. For example, eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of your clients.) So don’t be overwhelmed in reviewing the lessons for success. The rewards are self justifying.

For those of you not familiar with the book, Hill interviewed more than five hundred successful people from early last century. He identified thirteen behavioral traits common to most of these outstanding performers. We are talking about people like Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, Wilbur Wright, Henry Ford and Woodrow Wilson. This sounds like pretty good company to keep. And think about the tools not available to aid in their success. Their time was before Social Security, Medicare, personal computers, Internet, cell phones, email, Tweeter, Face Book or even fax machines. And the economic times they experienced were as rough as or rougher than ours today.

I remember the comment about wealth distribution I learned a number of years ago. If all the money in the world was collected and deposited in one place, it would all soon find itself back in the same pockets. What makes the difference in the determination of who will develop and continue to attract wealth regardless of the external circumstances? Our internal guidance and our external activities have and will always make a huge difference between having abundance or not.

I need not cover all thirteen of Hill’s points as you may read or review for yourself. But here is one insight with some clues. “Truly, thoughts are things and powerful things at that, when they are mixed with definiteness of purpose, persistence and a burning desire for their translations into riches.” Learn how to utilize the power of the Mastermind Group, energizing the subconscious mind to maximize our natural given brain power. If anything, technology has increased the information available and the speed to access it. William E. Henley, in his poem, Invictus, (also a great recent movie of the same title) writes that “It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”

So Captains, we all, first take charge of our thoughts. Mix in some faith, education and persistence and if you believe in the fundamentals you will not be surprised at your successful results. These principles held true in the past and no doubt will be valid in the future so let’s be intelligent and utilize these ideas in our present.