Off topic -- WSJ on clothing tags being itchy.
[Our kids have been making us cut out these tags for years now. I guess their necks are not super-sensitive; it's the tags that are different !]
December 27, 2001
Must Clothing Labels Be a Pain in the Neck?
Legal Rules, Costs Make Tags Cutting Edge
By BARBARA CARTON
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
When she can no longer bear scratchy labels on her
collars, Werna Anderson sometimes reaches back and
tries to rip them out.
"There's a special place in hell for these manufacturers,
I'm sorry to say," says Ms. Anderson, an art teacher in
Oklahoma City. "Don't they wear clothes? Or do they
get their clothes without them? Maybe they can afford
the couture."
The clothing label, once regarded as an incidental wisp,
is finally making its mark -- often a welt on the
wearer's neck.
"You pick up this gorgeous sweater or beautiful piqué
shirt, and it has a razor blade in the back," complains
Rob Eldridge, packaging manager at Dillard's Inc., the
big retail chain. (Of course, this never occurs at Dillard's, Mr. Eldridge insists.) Rhonda Blasingame, a
seamstress in Jackson, Miss., says that so many of her customers complain about stiff, scratchy labels that
she has a standard charge for cutting them out: $3.
The Razor or the Crowbar?
At times, labels seem to be melted into the fabric. In Nevada, Galeyn Molnar, a controller at a Carson City
aerospace-engineering firm, just bought a pair of jeans with a waistband label she claims must have been
"welded" on. She debated how to get it off: "Bring in the razor, or perhaps a crowbar."
Retailers blame inferior label materials and manufacturing processes for the hazardous label attack. Label
makers say they try their best, and they blame economizing imposed on them by their customers, the apparel
makers.
"The only reason consumers are cutting out labels is that people are cutting costs on some of their labels, and
the customer obviously finds them annoying," says Jeffrey Stern, vice president for sales and marketing at
Alkahn Labels Inc., a closely held New York firm that manufactures labels for the clothing industry.
Instead of old-fashioned silk or some other naturally soft material, the apparel industry turned in the 1960s to
less-expensive polyester for its labels. Today, polyester accounts for 75% to 80% of all labels found in
mass-market stores, label makers say.
The Hot-Wire Issue
Label watchers say the problem really got started about five years ago, when the industry began moving to
machinery with a new method of cutting labels off the loom: slicing them with a hot wire. That melts the
label's edges. Since polyester is an oil-based derivative, the process is a bit like torching plastic; when the
edges cool, they congeal into an abrasive ridge.
Lands' End Inc., the Dodgeville, Wis., catalog company, four years ago switched to a softer-weave label
after customers grumbled about scratching, even though the retailer's cost doubled to four cents per label.
Sara Lee Corp. of Chicago 18 months ago began stamping its label on some of its garments, including Hanes
T-shirts, claiming the stamp, which looks like an iron-on tag, is a lot less irritating than an ordinary tag.
"We're definitely looking at extending it to other Hanes products," says Terri Thompson, merchandising
director for Hanes underwear.
Labels weren't always such a sensitive issue. The government didn't even require them until the Wool
Product Labeling Act of 1939, which stipulated that merchants couldn't pass things off as wool that weren't.
In the intervening years, the government has required manufacturers to cram ever-larger amounts of
information on the labels -- including country of origin, fiber content and cleaning instructions.
The larger labels or bunches of them needed to accommodate all this verbiage -- and other information the
clothing makers want you to know -- has made those melted-polyester edges larger, sawing longer cuts into
the skin. Globalization hasn't helped. Some labels have grown in size to accommodate "100% wool" in five
languages, plus multicultural cleaning instructions such as "sol limpoieza en seco" (dry-clean only).
Folding over the rough edges of an irritating label could solve the problem, but that could add as much as
40% to the cost of a standard two-cent label, says Victor Hershaft, vice president of Paxar Corp., White
Plains, N.Y., another label maker. Ultrasonic cutting techniques, which use high-frequency vibration to slice
the polyester, produce label edges that are less irritating, but the process also adds 15% to the label cost.
Sometimes, Mr. Hershaft says, the problem is that the label isn't used by apparel makers the way it was
intended. For example, a label that isn't engineered to withstand extreme heat might be inadvertently fried as
part of a pre-wear process, rendering it stiff as a board. Finishes applied to labels to make them easier to
handle during the sewing process, while often designed to wash out, can also turn a soft-as-silk label into a
thing of torture.
Jail Time for Tag Abuse?
Label pile-ups also complicate the problem. U.S. law requires that the "country of origin" label be placed in
the neck of any garment that has one; manufacturers say that is so it can be spotted easily by customs
inspectors. The Federal Trade Commission specifies that the care label has to be readily visible -- although it
says it has never jailed anyone for, say, putting a tag in the elbow of a suit jacket.
Some information the government requires can be placed on removable care tags. But it's cheaper just to sew
them all in at one place. This often means they are bunched together at the neckline -- such as that of the $54
Talbots Inc. "Intimates" nightgown now on the shelves. It has three labels at the neck -- one of which feels
scratchy -- with the brand, size, fiber content, country of origin, and washing instructions in English and
French. A Talbots spokeswoman says they are together so that they can all be seen as easily as possible, and
placement is dictated by federal regulation.
The plastic thread that's often used to stitch the tags together -- it looks like something you'd use to catch a
bass -- also pokes with pointy ends. "All the little tails of it dog," is how Kay Lancaster, a botanist in
Hillsboro, Ore., describes the pointy-end issue. "You're standing there in an elevator, and the back of your
neck is itchy, and you're trying not to look like you have Saint Vitus' Dance."
From a consumer's standpoint, there's only one thing to do: operate.
Easier said than done. Yanking at a label is often like pulling at the chain-stitching on a bag of dog food: the
garment unravels. This is because most labels are sewn, again to cut costs, directly into the seams during the
assembly process.
Donna Himelfarb, of Skaneateles, N.Y., found this out when she tried to remove the label from an expensive
gray twinset. "The whole neckline fell off," she says. Ms. Himelfarb praises the softness of some Gap Inc.
underwear she recently purchased -- but she says the tags were so scratchy and "voluminous" she reached
around with scissors and cut them off. Gap says it hasn't had any label complaints on underwear, and
suggests that Ms. Himelfarb contact customer relations.
The Errant-Scissors Issue
Barry B. Bean, a cotton buyer from Peach Blossom, Mo., says he has always been a fan of Cabela's Inc. polo
shirts, but "in the last year and a half, you put them on ... and after about 30 minutes, your neck is just going
crazy. It feels like a mosquito, except you're being bitten all day long." So he tried the
scissors-down-the-neck method on a salmon-colored favorite, only to poke a hole in the shirt.
Cabela's says it doesn't know why he is having a problem. But a spokesman says that the company has
recently made improvements in its labels to reduce irritation, and is making similar improvements in its
underwear for next year.
In Philadelphia, Sandy Yim, a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, has given up. She complains that an
abrasive side-seam label in a khaki skirt recently gave her a "big welt" on her thigh. Ms. Yim has hung the
skirt back in her closet. "I don't want to think about it for a while," she says.
Write to Barbara Carton at barbara.carton@wsj.com
Copyright © 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
