Stepping Up
I always have an open mind as you cannot predict what is going to happen today or tomorrow or the next day or who you are going to meet. Chance meetings with someone can create opportunities like what happened yesterday.
My daughter was at an online sales platform conference with many other vendors and one of those vendors happens to manufacture blankets. What she did amazed me and made me proud all at the same time as she approached this person representing this company who turned out to be the owner. If you knew my daughter she would not say boo to anyone and she knows I always drum it into my kids you have to seize the moment and not hesitate. How many times do you go home and regret not speaking to someone and missed the opportunity? I am just happy she stepped up which shows she has grown and has more self confidence.
It turns out this company manufactures more than 20 types of blankets including dog blankets and they also import textile waste. My daughter assumed they must create their own waste from the textile waste during the manufacturing process and it turns out they do just that. We are not interested in buying the textile waste they import as I can only imagine the prices would not be competitive knowing the logistics prices of containers and shipping. The waste they generate during the manufacturing process is what we are after and that should be dirt cheap.
I have a suspicion they buy the cotton reel textile waste which is the process of taking clothing and rags back to cotton on a reel. This is a specialized operation and would obviously be cheaper than buying virgin non used cotton. I do not see them buying the type of textile waste we buy because to make that into a blanket fit for human purposes would take some imagination and skill.
From those that follow my posts know that we manufacture and stuff punch bags and one of the stuffing materials required is clean textile waste. It is hard to believe that sourcing textile waste is very difficult and it has monetary value. Who is using it I have no idea and what it is being used for again I do not know. There is one company left supplying punch bags in South Africa and knowing our market share their days must be numbered. All this means is our volumes will suddenly increase when that company goes under. This is a good problem to have, but it is still a problem trying to find more textile waste.
The textile waste I have sourced locally took many months of research and why there is no textile waste locally is most of it is exported. My supplier was happy to sell his entire textile waste to myself as exporting was a hassle and exporting 100 tons took many months to gather so their payments were like once per year. Supplying us he gets paid every other month and he has no hassles of storing and then loading multiple containers all at once.
The biggest problem I have is finding the quantity required of textile waste as the demand in the peak months is in the region of 40 tons. This to give you an idea is 4 x 40ft containers and is a lot of material. Once our competition folds we will need an extra 10 tons so the target is 50 tons of textile waste every month. Finding as many sources as possible is an ongoing task that will never end as finding the right material is the secret in the punch bag business. This is the reason why over the last 20 years there must have been more than 15 suppliers who have failed. These suppliers were supplying far less than we are doing on a monthly basis so it highlights we are doing rather well.
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At best it's a good problem to have, there must be a scalable solution out there to come across when you continue searching. I've fallen into that category many times of not speaking my mind at that moment only to get back home and beat myself over it. I wonder what really gives to make the switch, all preparedness vanishes outside the window when the moment to speak comes about.
I think the answer is you just do it and do not think about it and it becomes normal.