Episode 41 – Industrial Insights: COVID Recovery, Direct Sales & More

Welcome to the TRSA podcast. Providing interviews and insights from the linen, uniform, and facility services industry. Most Americans might not realize it, but they benefit at least once per week from the cleanliness and safety of laundered, reusable linens, uniforms, towels, mats, and other products provided by various businesses and organizations. TRSA represents the companies that supply, launder, and maintain linens and uniforms. And in this podcast, we will bring the thought leaders of the industry to you.

 

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Linen, Uniform and Facility Services podcast, interviews and insights by TRSA. I’m your host, Jason Risley. It’s an exciting time here at TRSA as several of our staff members have embarked on a Midwest road trip to visit operator members and supplier partners to the industry. This follows up on TRSA’s reopening tour to the Southeast that took place in late April. If you haven’t already, make sure you follow TRSA on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter for updates from the trip.

 

TRSA also is planning visits to the Northeast, Southwest, and West Coast later this year. Tune in to this podcast and keep an eye out for the latest news from the reopening tours in Textile Services Weekly and Textile Services Magazine. On today’s episode of the podcast, we get an update from the industrial sector from John Auriemma, the president and owner of American Ware Inc, a company that has been based in East Orange, New Jersey since 1984. American Wear specializes in the rental and sale of industrial uniforms and mats in the New Jersey and New York metropolitan area. Prior to joining as family owned company, Ariema was a certified public accountant with Coopers and Lybrand in New York City.

 

He is a member of the TRSA Industrial Uniform and Workwear Committee and earned his bachelor’s degree in accounting and marketing from Seton Hall University. To examine future imp improvement possibilities, we’re gonna start by reviewing how COVID has set the stage for the months years to come, and I’ve been asked to share American Ware’s perspectives. American Ware is an industrial uniform rental company. We specialize strictly in industrial. We’re based in East Orange, New Jersey, which is the Greater New York City market.

 

And like everyone in our industry and in our country, we’re happy that things are opening up. Here in the northeast, we’ve had a delay in opening as opposed to some other parts of the country. What we found is that over the last couple of weeks, restaurants are are finally opening at a 100%. Arenas are opening and and this is very, very timely in the sense that it’s just occurring. So we’ve struggled.

 

I’m happy to say from the industrial side, our business hasn’t been really affected. But I know on the linen supply side, my peers in our local area have have suffered, and they’re happy to be coming back right now. As far as what COVID has meant to our business, and I think that a big plus for us was starting the hygienically clean certification process with TRSA probably at the beginning of the COVID outbreak. And that it was it was unrelated, But we found that a lot of our customers, particularly in the food service, area are very keen on what we do and how we do it. In in many cases, we’ve shared with them the, hygienically clean certification process, and we’re using that as a marketing tool to attract new customers.

 

So that was one plus, if you will, of, of the COVID pandemic. Other things that we’ve put into play is prior to the start of COVID, we initiated putting in an RFI Beach tracking system. We finished it probably last March. In fact, our contractors left here March 1st March 16th. It was the end of the world, so our timing was kind of unique.

 

But that’s helped us a great deal in terms of marketing and in reducing staff. That’s been a big part of how do we deal with the shortage of labor. Now for a brief message from TRSA. Laundries are certified hygienically cleaned through 3rd party inspection and quarterly testing that quantifies an established threshold of pathogens on textiles to levels that pose no threat of illness. Inspectors also verify employee training, safety standard compliance, and operational efficiencies.

 

Certified laundries must maintain a quality assurance or QA manual that indicates their management, housekeeping, and training practices comply with the hygienically clean standard. Now back to the episode. I’ve been in the business now. It’s 37 years. When it when I came in, we began to sell to our customers.

 

You know, there’s a lot of debate. I mean, you know, we’re rental specialists, but we’ve always used the premise that we’re garment specialists. We didn’t want to to let that direct sale dollars go somewhere else. So it’s been a long process of building a rapport with our current customers. Just to give you an idea where we are right now, we’ve got a a direct sale business that’s just at under about $3,000,000 a year, and that’s without any additional staffing per se.

 

It’s handled through our route reps. It’s handled through our stockroom. We do have an in house we do have 1 in house, direct sales specialist. But what it does is it gives us the opportunity to develop a better closer relationship with our customers. It’s a it has a double edged sword to it.

 

K? The disadvantages are your prices must be super competitive because you don’t want a customer to go somewhere else and find out that you’re you’ve been overcharging them. So that that’s a sensitivity issue. The other thing is a lot of pressure on accurate and timely deliveries. Because the last thing you wanna do is be late with a with a golf outing delivery or something like that, where all of a sudden, all the good you do on the rental side gets flushed away with having a a bad experience on the direct sales side.

 

Overcoming all of that, it’s very easy or it’s if it’s coordinated properly, in today’s environment with preprinted catalogs from suppliers like SanMar, Their literature is very it’s excellent. It’s descriptive. It’s priced, and it’s easy to distribute. Customers love looking through the books. We on our end, we’ve now, over the years, we’ve developed an in house screen printing operation, an embroidery operation.

 

We make our own emblems. We are a one stop shop, and we control all those processes, which is really the in our case, was the key to our success. In the past, we had subcontracted it. You lose control, you really lose your advantage in this particular type of business. As I said, over the years, looking at we’ve looked at this very strategically and very closely, and I can tell you that it has benefited our business immensely in terms of our customer retention and in our in our overall I guess I guess what I’m trying to say is our reputation as garment experts.

 

You know, on the rental side, we people know what you can do in uniforms, but when you really show them what you can do in this other area, it does not hurt your overall satisfaction with your customers. And as I said, in our case, we’ve got great customer retention. So there are advantages and a lot of people look at this a little differently. I don’t regret getting into that business, getting and staying in it. It’s helped us a a great deal.

 

If you like what you heard in this episode, make sure you tune in to TRSA’s improving route Stop Performance webinar series brought to you by TRSA’s Industrial Uniform and Workwear Committee. Part 2 of the series will take place on August 4th and part 3 on September 15th. Registration will open soon for these webinars on trsa.org. The first webinar in the series took place on June 23rd. You can view the recording in TRSA’s on demand learning center, which houses more than 100 50 webinars, training videos, and other e learning courses.

 

Many of TRSA’s on demand webinars can be accessed by members for free. Thanks again for tuning in to the podcast, and please subscribe, rate, and review our show on Apple Itunes, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher.