Today was not a fun day.

Woke up at about 6:00 AM to a fire alarm.  Turns out a water pipe had burst in the lobby of the building I live in.  Scrubadoo’s office is located in commercial space at the ground level of the same building.

Guess where the pipe bust was?  Needless to say we were basically swimming in water this morning.  It is extremely cold in MN right now (think -10ish) so the hot water that was pouring everywhere was throwing off an amazing amount of steam.  The firefighters that responded to the alarm broke through the glass security door to the building and then proceeded to kick in the two doors to our office.  I am actually ok with this (better than having someone stuck and in trouble).

But everything was a mess.  Damages basically consisted of walls, scrubs, and a day of my life cleaning up.  It got me thinking of the other low points of running scrubadoo.

• We played a part in messing up a large order this past Christmas.  Total cost ~$1,000.  We ate the total cost despite having about 50% of the responsibility.
• My honor being questioned by a supplier when we first started the company.  Essentially we were promised certain terms by our account rep, he left the company and my new rep wouldn’t honor it.  I took it all the way to their CEO when he basically called me a liar.  I didn’t have it in writing – lesson learned.
• Writing a $6,000 dollar check to a company for web development – despite literally zero  of our line items promised were completed.

There have been a lot of tough times for us.  To this point we have pushed through and kept on growing.  I am sure there will be more to come.  Have I ever mentioned starting a company is tough?

Over the last few weeks we have begun to receive more and more calls about providing wholesale scrubs to a variety of different retailers, embroiderers, schools, etc.

I am inclined to think this is because of our in house SEO efforts around the key word “wholesale scrubs,” that have resulted in better organic search results for that word (if you have a website and want to link to our wholesale scrubs page to help us out I would have no issue with it!).  I should probably write a little more about SEO at some point as this has become a major focal point for our company over the last several months. But I digress…..

I am coming to the quick  realization that in order to be competitive in the wholesale scrub business (which is a key growth opportunity for us), we need to begin manufacturing our own “scrubadoo brand” scrubs.  Otherwise, we just can’t get to a price point that is competitive.  When we first started the company we actually visited the idea of our own brand but did not have the capitol, nor the demand for a product.  Fortunately, things are starting to change.

Thus I began to contact uniform manufacturers.  I have talked with a company in China, two in Haiti, and will hopefully have a call set up with a company in the US within the next week.  Thanks to our friends at Forgetful Gentlemen, I was informed of a site named Panjiva.com.  This site makes it incredibly easy to figure out who you should be contacting.

Basically, you tell panjiva what companies you are interested in seeing the import records for and they provide you with all kinds of data (apparently anything that you import into the US needs to be declared, along with where the goods were produced, who produced them, and it  is all public domain).

I know the names of the companies that sell me scrubs, so I told Panjiva to figure out where they were sourcing from.  Once I had the names I did a few quick Google searches and found contact information.  While it would probably be better to do my own homework on these companies, I am assuming that A) The largest distributor of uniforms in the US has done their homework and B)It will probably be easier for me to have a small run of scrub sets done at a factory that is already producing scrubs. Plus one of the factories in Haiti is certified by WalMart.

We haven’t decided who to go with yet, but we are moving along.   To be honest, I really have no idea what I am doing right now.  I figure I will learn as I go.   Oh, and I did call Haiti,  I used Google Calling, it was a short call but someone did pick up.  Hopefully, we have a high quality private label in the near future!