Case studies and classic mistakes
With almost a century of expertise behind us, we understand the complexities of uniform supply and how to make a school’s uniform shop run smoothly and efficiently. We’ve also seen classic mistakes made by schools which can be easily avoided when partnering with the right supplier willing to make your success our primary concern.
Case study 1
Too many SKUs, poor stock control, loss of quality control, too many suppliers, failure to invest in a supplier partnership.
Rob has been the uniform shop convenor (USC) at his outer-metropolitan co-educational school for 6 years. The school was nearly 1000 students in size at the beginning with hopes of expanding, but has in fact diminished to just 780 students currently. At the start of his position, he took over from another USC who had three of her own supplier relationships, but Rob felt he could do better by utilising a supplier relationship he had established at his previous school who he added to the mix to increase competition. He tried to maintain some loyalty with individual suppliers but found that a combination of better price offers and quality failures in existing deliveries forced him to look at changes more often than he might have liked. After 3 years a new principal was keen to introduce some minor uniform revisions to “sharpen up the image” and this had added a number of uniform items to the total number of Stock-Keeping Units (SKUs) and changed the fabric used in one garment. Rob tried to maintain the old stock from earlier suppliers but found that in addition to quality issues there were significant variations in sizing and cut between earlier and later suppliers and a lot of stock that just wasn’t moving.
A new business manager was appointed at the start of the current school year and conducted a review of the uniform shop and found that the capital outlay on stock at the uniform shop was very high, that the number of SKUs was high, that there were many SKUs with very low turnover. Many items were found to be of low quality or with slight variations in style colour or fit and appeared not to have moved for some years.
Lessons:
A school of this size has maybe 390 girls and 390 boys, equivalent to two very small single-sex schools, and the minimum ordering quantities for garments and for school-specific fabric will be a problem to be managed collaboratively for a single supplier. The school size is too small for multiple suppliers to be a winning strategy.
Quality has not been promoted as an initial primary outcome. The strategy here has been to minimize price and increase choice of garments, and in an ad-hoc rather than a planned fashion. The correct way to optimize the price/quality/service trade-off is to maximise quality first and to limit however possible the number of SKUs.
A school would generally need to have a student size of at least 1200 to warrant a dual supply arrangement.
The uniform shop would achieve greater outcomes for its school community if it were to partner with a uniform supplier with high expertise and reach and access to a range of stock lines.
Case study 2
High stock carry, insecure delivery, minimum ordering values too high.
Katherine has just taken over the uniform shop in her regional state high school of 800 students. She is organised and adept with numbers and has reviewed what figures are available on the past 3 years of sales and past ordering patterns, but is finding it very hard to establish reliable numbers to help place the orders for next year’s back-to-school period with any confidence. She is under pressure from the school business manager to somehow reduce the overall stock that is carried and the corresponding capital outlay, but is aware also that if she cuts the orders too low, she risks underestimating and having to place a late re-order when minimum ordering values are high so she will both be late in suppling the additional stock to justifiably impatient parents and will end up carrying the left-over stock through to next year. To make matters worse, the size distributions of past orders appear to be simply 5 in every very large and very small sizes and this appears to be just a number plucked out of the air because sales figures are variable and her current stock varies from a ridiculous oversupply of 4XL dresses to no stock at all in the very small sizes. There just doesn’t seem to be any way of getting it right.
Lessons:
In a competitive market where quality is secured and pricing is competitive, it is the management of stock levels that will be a chief determinant of the financial health and financial return of a uniform shop. Managing stock, placing of orders and correctly judging size distributions within an order is very important. Every child requires a uniform and so all atypical sizings must be catered for.
The best solution to this problem is to partner with a supplier to assist with ordering and to negotiate a stock carry and a stockholding service. The stock carry is the arrangement where the stock ordered is warehoused with the supplier and can be called on in tranches only as required. The stockholding service is an agreement that the supplier will manufacture beyond the yearly orders placed to provide back-up stock at their own warehouse to fulfil small added orders. This can also include covering additional atypical size orders.
The supplier may also be able to secure school-specific fabrics in the amounts that ensure timely delivery and hold these at the point of manufacture.
These services require that an enduring partnership be negotiated.
Case study 3
If possible, a uniform should be a mix of stock items and customised branded items.
Marissa manages a uniform shop for a catholic primary school of 560 students. It is a small school but has a strong school community and there is a wish for the uniform to be smart and recognisable and to confer a sense of pride in being part of the school community. The uniform in the past has been visibly of poor quality and there have been complaints of poor durability, poor comfort and the wash and wear characteristics being disappointing. Marissa says students’ Mums say the uniform just looks crumpled and “who has time to iron anything these days”. There is a community desire for an increase in garment quality but also “value for money”. The principal is keen for a review of quality but also wants the uniform to be distinctive with fabric designs and colours unique to the school. Marissa is unsure how all these expectations can possibly be met.
Lessons:
Selecting fabrics and design to maximise quality (durability, comfort, style, workmanship, consistency, wash and wear) while providing value for money and a customised brand requires specialist expertise. This comes best from a school apparel fabric specialist and school uniform manufacturer and supplier rather than from a fashion design house or a general apparel supplier or retail specialist. There are virtually no other garments that have the daily use and secondhand recycling that is characteristic of school uniforms. It is a specialised field.
Optimising a uniform for “value for money” while ensuring the highest garment quality is achieved through combining customised and stock items. High quality apparel solutions already exist for some uniform items and great economy can be achieved by adopting a stock item for part of the uniform in a standardised colour and fabric and if necessary adding a customised embellishment. Better uniformity and quality can be achieved this way, rather than designing all items on a school-specific fabric design or colour.
As an example, Wise Schools has developed a cotton-rich fabric that is light and breathable, with high comfort in hotter climates, excellent wash and wear characteristics with no ironing requirement and has low transparency, making it highly suitable for school blouses and dresses. This can be a school-specific design, while stock items are used elsewhere. Fabric science is key to achieving the desired mixture of characteristics to meet the functional requirements of a high quality school uniform.
Case study 4
Choosing to outsource — why not find and fix the problems instead?
Gail has taken up her new position as business manager at a long-established independent girl’s school of 1200 students. She has conducted a review of the school uniform shop which has seen a significant turnover of 4 uniform shop managers over 5 years. Gail is shocked to find that the stockholding and capital outlay at the uniform shop is very high, much higher than the similar-sized coeducational independent school where she worked previously, which was a hub of community engagement and was providing a valued return to the school as a profitable enterprise.
Digging into the detail, Gail finds that stock levels are high with great variability in garment quality, colour shade and fit and evidence of numerous past suppliers seen in the many labels on view. She finds that there are large numbers of stock in the very large and very small sizes, many of which appear to be very old indeed. Costs appear higher than she might have expected. On reviewing the past orders she finds size distributions in orders have been simply repeated each year without change using the previous year’s orders as a template. Gail conducts a parent satisfaction survey and finds there is widespread dissatisfaction with uniform quality and disappointment with the various suppliers that stock appears to have been consistently delivered late.
In discussions with the principal and the school board, and having found a specialist school uniform retailer willing to take over the uniform shop the school decided to move to an outsourcing model. A point of satisfaction was that the outsource supplier was willing to pay the school for all the current uniform stock at cost. This constituted a significant sum. Additionally, the contract involved a percentage of all sales as a licence fee to the school and this appeared to Gail to be similar to the return she was familiar with at her past school. The school board was sold on the pitch that managing a school uniform shop is not core curriculum for the school and that it was better that it be outsourced to a specialist in that domain.
Lessons:
If mistakes are made, then these need to be corrected. Once a uniform shop is running efficiently, the shop will return a correct market rate to the school community and this will necessarily be superior to that achieved by outsourcing. The strategy here was to effectively sell the enterprise to disguise the errors and the losses. The payment for stock here is the equivalent of being pleased to have been “paid” more than expected for a trade-in car — there is surely a balancing sum to be found elsewhere, in this case parents paying an ongoing higher price for uniform items to the new outsourced entity than they otherwise might have!
The expected return to the school community of running its own uniform shop will vary from school to school depending on choices made by the school and its community. These will include the uniform characteristics, the prices parents are willing to pay and some key variables such as the school size. It is also of note that a single sex school of 1200 is in a superior position to a coeducational school of 1200 as there is a lower SKU set and economies of scale are more readily accessed.
There is a significant cost in passing control of the school’s uniform to an external enterprise as if it is not a core concern. It can be central to a school’s identity, community and can offer returns beyond the financial returns of a successful enterprise.
Retaining control of a school community-run uniform shop and partnering for success is a superior strategy.