Images_Digital_Edition_January_2020

MARKET INTELLIGENCE www.images-magazine.com 112 images JANUARY 2020 Marshall Atkinson is a production and efficiency expert for the decorated apparel industry, and the owner of Atkinson Consulting and co-founder of Shirt Lab, a sales and marketing education company, with Tom Rauen. He focuses on operational efficiency, continuous improvement, workflow strategy, business planning, employee motivation, management and sustainability. atkinsontshirt.com For starters, I am seeing more shops beginning to make use of offshore art departments as a regular part of their business model. Shop owners are seeing an increase in wages, tighter production turns, and limited availability of skilled employees, which is forcing them into looking elsewhere for their creative team needs. Instead of having creative staff in their building, they are outsourcing this to firms with artists that live in India, Thailand or the Philippines. The expense for the image creation, art separation, mock-ups, embroidery digitising, or any other creative task, is often far less than what it would cost if you were to carry out the work in-house. Shops can also deploy technology to improve customer engagement. That chatbot in the bottom corner of your webpage can be set up to respond to customers’ questions and enquiries. Information can be sent or redirected to the appropriate part of the webpage FAQ. When the customer asks a question that the bot can’t respond to correctly, a message can be sent to a staff member to take over. Think about how this might make a difference for your shop. Tighter labour markets equal more training Finding employees is always hard. Hiring skilled and talented people that have experience in our industry is almost like stumbling upon a unicorn. It just doesn’t happen much. Therefore, shops are now being forced to hire people that may have great attitudes, but limited skills in the industry. As businesses are only as good as the people they employ, this means that more shops are, therefore, spending more time on training and building staff skills from scratch. As a result, suppliers and manufacturer partners are developing more frequent classroom-style seminars, or events at a partnering shop, than ever before. Trade show classes are on the rise. Shop owners are looking for help also with programmes, templates, or any resources that can give them a jump on the work. As new employees come into the fold, they are trained on basic skills. Current or veteran employees are being cross- trained to acquire new skills to build bench-strength. Shops are reaching out to HR professionals, or applicable software, to help them create these programmes and keep up with scheduling the learning opportunities. Cash upfront Lastly, the biggest trend that I see is the movement to collect 100% of the order payment upfront. Getting all of the money for the order is the best thing a shop can do to strengthen their financial circumstances. You’ll already know this if you read my article ‘Show me the money!’ in the November 2019 issue of Images . If you missed it you can read it here: imagesmag.uk/marshall-nov19. Remember, schools, businesses, and other typical slow-payers all have access to credit cards. If they don’t want to write a cheque or pay cash for their order, ask them to pay on their credit card. This will have a tremendous impact on your shop’s cashflow. Invite the public into your shop and let them print their own shirt