I need more waste fabric and need it within the next 3 weeks.
On Friday I had a lengthy meeting with someone who handles cloth material waste who could be the answer to the volume we require to stuff the punching bags. The material we are getting via another joint eco venture is only providing us with around 5 tons per month and in fairness after this meeting we know it is usable, but not as we had first thought.
The problem is this material we are currently receiving is very light so it cannot be used solely on it's own and would have to be added with something else. Even if it was a 70/30 mix this would still save heaps of money generating a decent profit which at the end of the day this is what this is about.
We discussed a compacting machine which would do away with having heaps of staff and the cost is not that bad and is something I would be prepared to purchase immediately. The roughly 20 minutes per bag it currently takes to stuff would require at least 10 staff members in order to achieve the numbers required. I require at least 1 bag every 5 minutes or 20 bags every hour to achieve the numbers for the orders I already have lined up. The cost of employing that amount of staff does not make this project viable along with all the other costs so a compacting machine is the solution.
I mentioned a joint partnership or venture where we are one new company, but as eager as he is I am still thinking this through thoroughly. I only mentioned it to see where he stood on this and to see what the real cost is of the cloth waste material. I still have a few rabbits to pull out of a hat and will be working on those this week. I am not about to give up a large percentage of the business unless I have no choice and I am not there yet.
The first orders are due in 3 weeks time which is roughly requiring 42 tons of stuffing ad have literally 5 tons which cannot really be used as the main stiffing. I have thought about a centralized bag tube of river sand that then has material stuffed around this, but then the compactor would be useless. The sand idea is similar in price to the waste material and this will need to be fine tuned in order to work with the compactor.
A close friend is checking out a clothing manufacturing company and may have to visit a competitor plant or follow their vehicles to see where they are buying their waste material. I have done something similar in the past and you normally find whatever you are looking for within a week.
