Take a look at the photo below and see if you can figure out what is wrong with this shirt.
One of our newer customers in the Seattle-Tacoma area ordered a small run of embroidered polos. They had been ordering these shirts for years from the logo wear vendor that preceded us. We dutifully ordered the shirts from our supplier. We were a little hesitant, though, because it has been our experience that some items from some suppliers do not seem to be subject to rigorous quality control standards.
The box arrived within a couple of days. We pulled the first polo shirt out of the box and set it down to mark it, but something did not look right. Have you figured it out from the photo above?
If you could not figure it out, try the same photo with some straight edge rulers placed strategically:
When the horizontal ruler is aligned with the bottom of the sleeves and the vertical rulers is aligned with the polo’s placket, you should expect to see that the intersection of the rulers creates angles of approximately 90 degrees. We’re not even close to that here.
We pulled the second one out of the box and it had exactly the same problem, but the opposite direction! Aaaarrrgh!
Rather than stitch on the shirts, we packed them all up, brought them to our customer, spread them out on our customer’s desks and asked, “Do you really want to see your staff wearing these?” The answer was an emphatic “No!”
We talked with our customer about how they were using these shirts. It turns out they were giving a new shirt to each new employee as the employees emerged from orientation training. We advised our client to order a similar shirt from an alternate supplier that, we believe, just has better quality controls in place for their polos. The customer agreed to switch and thanked us for showing her the problem with her original shirt selection.