A TIE-DYE SHIRT BUSINESS

Process design, according to Slack, Brandon-Jones, and Johnston (2013, p.97), means getting everything from the looks, arrangement, and workings of something well-prepared in order to make it official. I and my friend have discussed a number of ideas for the product we are going to sell and finally decided that ‘tie-dye shirts’ is the best option. We have a clear strategy for our product to go out and make an impression with the customers. In this essay, I am going to apply the process design in the production of the tie-dye shirts, which I believe it can be a huge success on the market if our strategy goes as planned.

Since most Vietnamese people are not really familiar with the term ‘tie-dye shirt’ and we are the newcomers to the business, the project processes is the best option for us to start the trial for our product. Different designs will be released in limited number for people in the capital city, Hanoi to test the market and people’s thoughts on tie-dye shirts. The curiosity of customers will be high as it could be the first time they have ever looked at a tie-dye shirt. As a result, many of them would have high interests in making purchases for our products, which is a positive note for a new start-up business like ours. At this early stage, we plan to introduce to the customers the best products with the best quality because we need to earn the reputation as well as their trust in order to make our business prosper in the future. In addition, keeping all the shirts at a reasonable price for everyone to buy is our priority, especially when the cost of producing those tie-dye shirts is low in comparison to other types of shirt.
Having established and proved ourselves in the business and on the market, we are planning to go with the batch processes to increase the volume of our production. In a batch processes, according to Caplan (2006), indistinguishable units of yield are delivered in gatherings called bunches, however the units in one clump can contrast essentially from the units in another group and the units inside of every group more often than not stay inside of close physical closeness all through the creation process. We want to keep our business and the production level at a medium point, but not too small when we are in the introduction stage since there are only two of us managing everything. We intend to co-operate with a well-known clothing distribution organization in Asia so that they can distribute our products to consumers outside Vietnam. Depends on the taxation rules in other countries, its price will be higher compared to the price we are selling in Vietnam. By linking with them, we are assured that people in other countries will not have to wait for a long period of time to buy their products as well as helping us reduce the inventory and processing costs (Slack, Brandon-Jones, and Johnston, 2013, p.99).
The main management issue we may have to face whilst increasing the production is the demand fluctuations. All of tie-dye shirts are short-sleeved, which means the demand for our products might be relatively low comes the winter season when everyone would rather wear a big coat than put on a short-sleeved shirt. To deal with demand fluctuations, we will use the ‘manage demand plan' to keep supplies and demand even (Brachmann). Setting up new and tempting promotions constantly is the only clear method to attract customers to come and buy in winter. “Buy one and you can get the second one for half of the price”, “Buy two and get one for free”, and “Buy one shirt and enter the competition to win vouchers” are the three promotions we are going to use when we have fluctuations in demand during the winter.
After the “honeymoon" period when our products are highly successful there comes the time the demand for our tie-dye shirts are starting to level off. Therefore, we would change from the batch processes to the jobbing processes. It is not economically good to keep producing at the high level of volume and variety at this stage while the demand for the products has been stalled. The variety for our products should be higher in the jobbing processes, but the volume would be lower. In this situation, lowering the price and having a dependable supply is what we need to do in order to achieve our main objective of maintaining the profits and to compete with other possible competitors on the market. We need to make sure that our customers will always get the deliveries of their purchases on time because the worse service we do, the more number of customers we will lose. The next and final stage of my business is the decline stage. Selling at this point is much, much harder since the interests of customers to the products have declined. Many businesses are likely to drop out of the markets because the profits are not enough for them to keep things going. We will have to allow price cutting in order to sell our products at this point and also to fend off other competitors (Hofstrand, 2007)
Overall, we strongly believe we have done a good job in making our business successful in both local markets and international markets using process design. We are planning to make our business even larger in the future by expanding the markets to the Africa, which is a very potential market according to recent researches, because the amount of profits we can make is huge.