Mke America Great Again Custom Hat
Make America Bang-up Again Hat Brought To Yous By Lean Manufacturing
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TRANSCRIPT: Mark Graban: Hi, this is Marking Graban. Welcome to Episode 234 of the podcast on Nov sixteen, 2015. Today'due south guest is Mitch Cahn; he is president of Unionwear, a manufacturer of hats, bags and apparel in Newark, New Jersey. I first learned nigh Mitch and his company at the Northeast LEAN Conference recently, and I blogged about that. You can find a link to it at leanblog.org/234. Now, what caught my centre was the political hats they produce, including the famous red "Make America Nifty Over again" hat that Donald Trump wears, among hats produced for other candidates. Beyond the surface of those hats is a fascinating story nearly competing instead of making excuses. Equally Mitch explains here in the podcast, Unionwear has been very successful, even though information technology'southward producing in one of the highest-price parts of the earth. Unionwear has had to compete against imports from China and lower-wage southern states here in the Usa, and LEAN has been a major part of their strategy for improving productivity, reducing cost and beingness fast to market. At present, whether you work in healthcare or manufacturing, you'll really love the story, the principles and the ideas behind Mitch, his company and his employees.
So, can yous get-go off past introducing yourself and your company, Unionwear?
Mitch Cahn: Sure. My proper noun is Mitch Cahn; I am the President of Unionwear. I started the business concern in 1992, and we're based in Newark, New Jersey. Nosotros manufacture baseball caps and all sorts of headwear, and sewn numberless, like backpacks, laptop numberless, tote bags, garment bags, and messenger bags. Everything is 100% fabricated in USA, and everything is made with wedlock labor.
Mark Graban: What prompted you to start the business?
Mitch Cahn: I started the business in 1992. I bought a bankrupt baseball cap manufacturing plant. Earlier that, I was working in investment banking, and I really didn't like it. I wanted to be the client—I wanted to brand stuff. So I spent about a year trying to come with an idea to outset a business, and and then I came beyond this minor baseball hat factory that had been foreclosed on in Jersey City, New Jersey, and I came upward with enough money to purchase the equipment at an auctions sale. I was going to practice something different with that business organization—I was going to start selling baseball caps to the fashion industry, which was not a thing in 1992. You couldn't go into The Gap or Macy's and purchase baseball caps back then, and I was actually successful very quickly. The thought caught on, and nosotros picked up customers like Ralph Lauren, Nordstrom's, and Izod, and we were helped by the growth of outlet stores at that time. However, past 1994, our entire business model complanate because all of those clients started manufacturing in China. It happened really speedily; I didn't run across it coming. It was only a couple of years afterward Tiananmen Square; Red china became this giant in the market economy, and one of the first items they went afterwards was baseball hats, because it's almost all labor.
And then we needed to come up up with a new business model quickly, and effectually that time we came upwardly with the thought of selling products specifically considering they were made in the U.s.a.—going afterward the Made in USA market. We started with labor unions. We actually named the company Unionwear considering unions were at that time i of our natural markets. We were the just marriage shop that made baseball hats. They were natural market for us, and then, by the year 2000, nosotros expanded into political campaigns when the Net made it possible for Al Gore'due south campaign to raise money past giving a baseball game hat away to every donor. We had that contract, and that's been a big part of our concern e'er since.
Nosotros slowly looked into other markets that we plant were ownership American. After our LEAN transformation in 2007, we were competitive with non-matrimony shops in the deep south. We could even compete with shops in Puerto Rico for military business—now that'southward huge part of our business too. In 2007, we bought a bag factory, and we did a LEAN transformation of that factory. Now that's about one-half of our business. We've continued to expand our markets equally the prices of imports continue to surge twelvemonth after year, while our domestic pricing really remains flat. We've been able to pause into more markets, particularly B2B markets that are looking at co-brands with the Fabricated in USA label, which is really the about valuable make in the world.
When someone gives a baseball game chapeau or purse away, they don't want that product to say "Fabricated in China". A lot of socially responsible companies give bags and hats away—Whole Foods, Google, and a lot of other companies—and they buy our products because the union label shows that the products were definitely not made in a sweatshop, and the Fabricated in USA label shows that the products were not shipped halfway around the globe. We've also been able to return to the mode concern over the concluding five years for the first time since the early on 90s; we've been more competitive, and mode businesses take been going for smaller batch manufacturing.
Mark Graban: Information technology sounds like there's a sense of purpose here, whereas a lot of industries and companies go with the menstruation. When business started going to China, all the lemmings said, "How-do-you-do, we accept to become to Cathay!" Even before yous discovered LEAN, why was it important to you to stay in New Jersey?
Mitch Cahn: Well, I e'er reminded myself (and that's the first ten years I was in business) that if I wanted to make coin, it would have been a lot easier for me to stay on Wall Street. I didn't desire to brand money; I wanted to make products. I find the manufacturing process extremely rewarding—I come up into work, and someone meets me with an thought and leaves a sample. Then I have to figure out how to industry that sample, what machines to purchase and what people to staff. To figure all that out and then get out in New York City and come across people wearing and using the products is very rewarding. So, that was 1 part of it—I savour the maker experience. Second, from the outset I wanted to brand sure that all of our employees were well compensated and had the aforementioned benefits as white-collar workers. Our union was the Ladies Textile Workers Wedlock, and they said we were the first company (and we're yet probably the only visitor) that went to them before nosotros started the business concern. We wanted to start a spousal relationship shop because I knew we were going to give our employees the benefits that union workers would earn anyway. We might every bit well take advantage of the relationship that the unions had and employ that for marketing purposes.
Mark Graban: I'm curious to hear more about LEAN. How did you first get introduced to the idea of LEAN?
Mitch Cahn: Around 2004, we faced with a lot of increasing expenses that were not really affecting the rest of the country. New Jersey was raising its minimum wage significantly ahead of the federal minimum wage. We were going to see our wages get up by about 30-40% pretty quickly. We besides had big increases in wellness care at that time, and most of our contest was non-union shops in the Due south, and in right-to-work states. In near non-marriage shops, until ObamaCare, there was no health insurance offered, and we started to see the cost rise over a 4-year flow. Nosotros used to pay $fifty a worker for health insurance, and past 2004, it was nigh $180. And then our real estate prices right outside the New York expanse started going up pretty quickly. And then nosotros couldn't compete with the South, even for the Made in the USA work, and I was very concerned with our ability to remain a viable company. I started looking for a magic bullet, and I stumbled upon a LEAN 101 seminar that was being run by a New Jersey Manufacturers' Extension Program (MEP). I took it, and it actually blew my mind. For anyone who isn't familiar with this program, it's a national program, a ane-day form that trains anybody from executives to manufactory workers on the whole LEAN process.
It puts people in a simulated manufactory making clocks. At the beginning of the day, anybody is using their own traditional methods to set up a product line and manufacture very uncomplicated clocks with the other executives—these are people who believe they know everything almost manufacturing. At the beginning of the twenty-four hours, all these executives working together, with all their brainpower, might produce about 15 clocks an hour. Throughout the form of the day, LEAN principles are introduced 1 by i. Then they do another faux menses, where the manufacturers take the principle they just learned and apply it to this mini-production line, and their book increases. From the outset to the end of the solar day, this group of executives volition increment their production from xv clocks to 300-400 clocks an hour! It really opened upwards my listen to the possibilities in my manufacturing plant. I notwithstanding remember when I came back, and all I could encounter was the opposite of LEAN. I was then angry! I was angry at everyone who worked for me for non seeing that they were doing non-value-added work all day, completely forgetting that I had just gone ten years without seeing any of that myself.
Mark Graban: Yeah, it becomes hard when you of a sudden see waste and problems that you would accept looked past before.
Mitch Cahn: I just wanted to do everything at one time, and of course you lot can't do that, but I did go back to MEP. I hired them for a minor projection while they submitted a grant proposal to the New Jersey Department of Labor to do a LEAN transformation for the states. I brought in the consultant from NJ MEP, and he met with our constitute manager at the time and me. The establish managing director was very one-time-schoolhouse, a traditional manufacturing product line person with virtually 30 years' feel, and he was very skeptical of the consultant. All he wanted to know was how he was going to make our machine operators sew faster, and the consultant said, "I can't do that. I don't know anything well-nigh sewing, to exist totally honest with you." The institute manager asked, "How are y'all possibly going to improve our production here?" and the consultant said "Well, I'm only going to focus on what they're doing when they're not sewing. I worked in food companies, paint companies and car companies, and it'due south always the same things. All I practise is await for those things, and I train your workers and your management to eliminate those things through designing the factory differently and training people differently." The constitute manager was not convinced, but I brought the consultant in anyway, and we started with a really simple project. He went for the low-hanging fruit, and he took a look at our embroidery functioning. We run about 12 embroidery machines here in the middle of our production process where we embroider our own hats and numberless.
He spent a day observing that process and asked me, "How long practice yous think your machines are downwards between orders?" I remembered this from the spreadsheet that I looked at when I bought the machines, and I said nearly 20 minutes. He'd fabricated a videotape, and he said, "Well, how about an average of about two one/2 hours?" I didn't believe him. I watched the videotape, though, and I saw that the machines were indeed down every bit he'd said. In the by, I'd walked around and saw everyone working hard and running around, so I couldn't understand why the machines were down for then long, and this was something that was going on xv to xx times a twenty-four hour period—that was the boilerplate number of orders that nosotros are pushing through the embroidery section a day. It turned out to a very elementary trouble with a very unproblematic solution.
Our embroidery director was a Chinese National who spoke English, and our embroidery operators were mostly from Spanish-speaking countries; they spoke a little English. The director gave the instruction to go pick out threads of sure colors for an society. From the time she gave the instruction to the fourth dimension they brought back the proper cones was about two and a one-half hours. Why? Based upon the instructions from the customer, she told the staff to look for, say, dark greyness and dark green. The employees would go out to the shelves of closed white boxes with the thread color names on them, and the names were things like cement, and soup and canary and so on. They had to open box afterward box to observe the right color thread. If they were lucky, it was the thread the embroidery director had envisioned in her mind. If they weren't lucky, they had to go back and return with another armful of threads. And then they would have to count out the threads—threads were shipped to u.s.a. in boxes of 12, and our machines had 20 heads on them. So they'd count them out, they'd have to find the beginning of each cone and they'd take to bring them to the machine, put them on the machine and thread them, and so go back to get the adjacent colour. So the consultant'south showtime projection was to go rid of all the colour names and go rid of the boxes. Nosotros put everything in giant zip-lock bags. Nosotros colour-coded our mill thread department similar a rainbow, and we referred to everything past colour number. We took all the threads and inventoried them in units of 20 to correspond to the machines' 20 heads. Bags would come out to the table; the embroidery machines would exist loaded. When it was over, cones would go dorsum into the numberless and be put back on the shelf. The whole process went from about two and half hours to 15 to 20 minutes pretty quickly, and we were easily able to run into the power of LEAN in that department. We were sold.
And then we went ahead, nosotros got the grant, and we spent about two years putting in every facet of LEAN into the factory. We put in 5S, we put in all sorts of Kanban, we did single cell flow, and every one of these steps was really a phenomenal success for us. The 5S is something that we do every year, and information technology's something the owner actually needs to be involved in. For example, no one who works for me is going to throw a machine away. I'll say, "Hey, we're never going to utilise that machine! No one is going to pay for it, I just looked on eBay; we're just going to sell information technology for fleck." No ane else will say that. And so I demand to actively evidence up, ready to go muddied for a couple of days.
Mark Graban: Y'all mentioned the MEP programs, and for people who aren't familiar with that, it'south a federally sponsored and funded program, but the MEPs operate at the state level. Some of the MEPs are doing work with healthcare organizations—the Ohio MEP, which works under the proper name TechSolve, is working with both manufacturers and healthcare providers. You talked most your healthcare costs going up. If y'all went into a infirmary, I know you would come across the parallels of why it takes so long between cases in the operating room. You lot talked about sewing—we're not request the surgeons to work faster, we're just trying to maximize the corporeality of fourth dimension during the day they can actually be surgeons, and that makes a huge deviation in healthcare. Hopefully it'southward going to help get costs nether control. At that place are big parallels there.
Mitch Cahn: Yeah, at that place are a lot of parallels between healthcare and manufacturing, and coincidentally, while we were going through the starting time LEAN transformation my get-go son was born. The consultant, Dave Hollander, who shepherded united states through this whole process, always tells how I came back from the infirmary with all these ideas—it was Mt. Sinai in New York, which was already implementing LEAN—that I wanted to put in our factory. We still employ a lot of those processes, like colour-coded folders. There are and then many LEAN improvements that we made, but one of the first principles that they taught usa was to get rid of tables. Tables are evil! Unless you are using the tabular array for a particular job, it'due south going to be filled with garbage, on peak and underneath, because that's human nature. I noticed that in hospitals, if anybody needs a tabular array, they get a rolling cart, so we gave everybody their own rolling cart. We designated places on the cart for everything that they demand, and we gave them a small-scale personal space on the bottom for their own stuff. We however utilise that, and apart from the productivity gain, the amount of space nosotros gained was nifty.
Marker Graban: There is a practiced full general LEAN principle: put everything on wheels! Be flexible so yous tin can rearrange cells, rearrange the layout, make changes every bit customer demand changes to create different chapters—that's definitely a great lesson. In that location was a letter of the alphabet that you had posted at the Northeast LEAN Conference. Could you talk a piffling scrap more than about the idea? I think a lot of manufacturers nonetheless don't become the idea that they can't create value past cutting labor costs. You take to redeploy labor in creating more than value. Can you talk almost what that's meant for you lot and the company?
Mitch Cahn: Okay, we have a single-minded focus on creating value. In one case the people who work hither understand what that means, then it becomes a mindset, and information technology becomes very easy to implement any of the features of LEAN. Nosotros are here to create a finished product that needs to become correct into a box and get shipped to a client, and that client will just pay for the value that nosotros added to that production. And then, if we're making products, and we're putting them in boxes, it's inventory. We're not creating value at that fourth dimension; we're just creating inventory. If we are creating work in procedure because people are working faster, that'southward not finished production that we can sell. Nosotros're not creating value. At present, if we are able to improve our productivity and then that we're creating a lot of value, and considering of that I lay people off, I'thou non actually creating value by doing that, either. Creating value means if I have a 100 people, and they used to make 1,000 hats a day, and now they can brand 2,000 hats a 24-hour interval, and then 50 people can make 2,000 a twenty-four hour period, I'm creating value by taking those other l people and creating another product with them. That to me is creating value. One of the keys to our success is our ability to measure the amount of value that we create. We have a process that we utilise. We do a lot of custom products—baseball game caps are a very cookie-cutter process, that's only almost half of our business. The other half is bags, and every bag that we make is different. 1 day we'll be making tote bags, the next 24-hour interval nosotros'll be making messenger bags. They've got totally different value street maps, and they've got totally different constitute layouts.
So the first process for us is to figure out by doing a traditional time study, what is the wheel time of this production? What is the amount of time that the worker is actually adding value to the product, simply picking two pieces of textile and sewing them together? Or cutting that fabric—that's really all we do that adds value. Everything else we practice, such every bit looking for thread, waiting for instructions from a director, redoing piece of work or building upwards piece of work in process, that'south not adding value. Then if nosotros take an attaché, and nosotros know that attaché has 20 minutes of time that'south spent just calculation value to that product, we tin then measure our output in terms of minutes of work created against the corporeality of time that our workers worked. And then we say, based on our fourth dimension studies, our workers created x,000 minutes of work today, merely based on our fourth dimension clock, they worked 20,000 minutes. That means they spent 50% of their time creating value. Nosotros measure out this all the fourth dimension. Information technology enables us to get our pricing in check, enables u.s. to know if we're meeting our margins just by walking on the flooring and seeing if there is work in process or if in that location are people moving around. It's created goals for everybody to know whether the store is LEAN and creating value or non.
At present, when we started this process, before we did any LEAN stuff, we were calculation value only 20% to 25% of the time. The rest of it was all spent on not-value-added piece of work. By the end of the procedure, we were adding value almost 65% of the fourth dimension, so our productivity well-nigh tripled. Information technology was hard for near of our line workers to grasp the concept of what we were trying to sell to them, so nosotros inverse our measurement from pct of time working efficiently (or adding value) to hours per 24-hour interval, so people finally started to go it. We said, hey, yous know, believe it or not, you lot're simply spending well-nigh two hours a mean solar day sewing, but yous're getting paid for viii. We're request y'all to spend nigh v and half to six hours sewing and go paid for eight, and they got it. That actually seemed like a great deal to them. Nosotros were able to retrain everybody on LEAN principles; nosotros made our own videos highlighting about 50 dissimilar non-value-added tasks that were regularly performed in the factories, so nosotros could help people identify them.
Mark Graban: There are many things that are interesting and impressive about your story, but I retrieve one of them is your involvement as an owner. LEAN is not simply an operations strategy; information technology actually is a key piece of your business strategy—it's how you're running the business organisation and trying to be successful in the long term.
Mitch Cahn: Yeah, I retrieve if I were to describe my job, I'k in charge of LEAN here. Everything else kind of takes care of itself, only LEAN is a boxing against human nature, and it constantly needs improvement. If you lot're doing LEAN properly, you need to continually improve, because if y'all are able to clear up one bottleneck, at that place'south going to be another clogging created somewhere else. You clear upwards that bottleneck in sales, and in that location's going to be a bottleneck in product. You clear up that clogging, then you find a bottleneck in order processing. So I exit the pinnacle line growth up to the salespeople, and I take care of the growth and chapters by implementing LEAN principles throughout our entire organization.
Mark Graban: At the briefing you displayed hats yous'd produced for Jeb Bush and for Hillary Clinton, and there was the bright cerise, very familiar Donald Trump "Make America Great Once again" hat. I was wondering if at that place were any stories, especially backside the Trump lid. I'one thousand curious nigh getting that business and trying to deliver a large number of hats relatively quickly. Are in that location whatsoever stories that you lot can share about that?
Mitch Cahn: As for Hillary Clinton's campaign, we have been doing work for a company called Financial Innovations for decades. They've been managing the Democratic candidates for President for quite some time, ever since Nib Clinton. We accept a very strong human relationship with them. 1 of the reasons our visitor is regularly chosen to produce products for candidates is that we tin can produce goods quickly. Candidates don't buy for the long-term—a lot of the primary candidates right now don't know if they're going to be effectually in two or three weeks, so they're ordering every calendar week. Instead of ordering 25,000 hats at a time, they're ordering 2,000 or 3,000 hats a week. They need people who can turn things quickly, and because of our LEAN principles we can exercise that. Nosotros don't accept a lot of piece of work in process on the flooring, so we're able to rush orders for people who demand them. Some other reason is that we're a wedlock shop, and the union label assures political campaigns that we've already been vetted for whatsoever sort of social compliance issues. That's a smaller issue for the Republican side, though we have done a ton of Republican work. We did all of the work for the John McCain campaign, and we're doing about four candidates right now. They just ask that we don't put a union label inside the hat, for whatever reasons.
The 2d reason that nosotros're chosen is that we have a reputation. The candidates don't desire to get bitten by going to unknown manufacturer and finding out the products were really made overseas. Our reputation as a military contractor says to them that we take been vetted by the military, and military machine goods need to be made domestically—not merely all the labor but even all of the components for those products need to be sourced domestically. So I think that's why they come to united states of america. We never work with the campaigns directly; we always become through advert agencies. The particular agency that nosotros worked with on the Trump hat came to us from the Made in USA Foundation. They were concerned after they'd seen these hats existence fabricated overseas and contacted that bureau, who told them that they don't need to put "Make America Great Again" on a chapeau that says Fabricated in Red china.
Marker Graban: Correct. It's interesting that of the three hats that were on brandish, the Trump hat was the only 1 that did not have Fabricated in the USA embroidered on the brim. I think some people misunderstand LEAN as being about toll, when the principal thing is near improving flow, as you've described so well here—reducing setup times, improving productivity as a way of existence more responsive to customers. Those are really powerful things, and they tin lead to being price-competitive, every bit it seems yous've washed at Unionwear.
Mitch Cahn: Yes, it has, and in many means that you wouldn't conceptualize. LEAN has developed our dedication to measuring time and doing value stream maps for nearly every product that we manufacture. Our production process is data-driven. Over the last v years, much of our business has been re-shoring, where companies, usually in the mode or promotional industry, have been getting products made overseas just are starting to reconsider. In the past, our hats might have been 10 times as much every bit the lid fabricated in Communist china, but now they're only 25% or 30% more. Companies are much more likely to switch at present, so we're constantly getting products that have been manufactured overseas, and we're asked to quote on them for domestically made product. We await at the way these products are fabricated overseas, peradventure in China, and it doesn't make whatsoever sense to us. Take a tote handbag for example—they throw labor at it to salvage on materials. It's a dead giveaway when I run into a tote bag that has a seam running along the bottom. If you cut that tote bag in ii pieces, you're going to get a lot more than numberless out of the roll of fabric than if yous cutting one large piece, merely it adds a lot of labor and makes information technology a weaker bag. It makes no sense unless y'all're trying to salvage on materials.
So we take these products and nosotros reengineer them in a way that is LEAN and uses the least amount of labor possible. Between our productivity increases and our ability to reduce the amount of labor that goes into the product, nosotros're able to compete on many items, especially in the fashion business organization.
Mark Graban: I really appreciate yous beingness able to share your story both at the Northeast LEAN Conference and for taking time to talk with me here today, Mitch. Again, my guest has been Mitch Cahn, President of the company, Unionwear. Mitch, I was wondering if you want to talk about the visitor'south website, or ways people can learn more nigh your business organisation, or if you accept any final thoughts for the listeners.
Mitch Cahn: Certain, our website is unionwear.com. Nosotros have over 40,000 Made in USA products that yous tin can search for and order straight on the website. You can contact me through the website if you have any questions well-nigh LEAN. I love helping other manufacturers who are just getting started in the LEAN procedure. I just want to warn yous—information technology's never a good time to beginning, simply once you get-go, y'all will be rewarded. You'll never finish, just you will be continuously improving.
Mark Graban: Well said, and cheers, Mitch, for that final thought and for being a guest here today on the podcast, I really capeesh it.
Mitch Cahn: You're welcome. Thanks.
Introducer: Cheers for listening. This has been the LEAN Blog podcast for LEAN news and commentary updated daily is at world wide web.leanblog.org. If yous have whatsoever questions or comments nearly this podcast, email Mark, at leanpodcast@gmail.com.
Source: https://unionwear.com/news-and-press/make-america-great-again-hat-brought-to-you-by-lean-manufacturing/