Due Thursday November 14th at 12:00 PM PST

use the template

For Case 73 you can address the “major question”: what would you advise this company to do in this situation?  Come up with two possible ways to go.  Also consider what the company can do moving forward to make sure they are really getting organic fabric.

PLEASE do some research to support your solutions!


Major Question

If you were a business consultant to Lewis & Lee, what would you advise it to do about this situation?

Case 73 THE FLANNEL ORGANIC FIBER FIASCO

Connie Ulasewicz, San Francisco State University

Lewis & Lee is a contemporary domestic clothing manufacturer of a line of whimsical layette items and accessories for the infant to 4T set. The line includes hats, booties, blankets, and bibs offered in bright novelty stripes, prints, and solids. The Lewis & Lee layette collection is marketed as a 100 percent organic cotton, gift-packaged, flannel program. The layette items are continually available for stores to reorder 12 months of the year. Lewis & Lee products are available in a variety of department stores including Macy’s and Saks, independent specialty stores, hospital gift shops, and through its Web site. The manufacturer is successful because it delivers a high-quality, domestically manufactured, well-priced, organic fiber product.

One of the fabrics with wide customer acceptance in the layette line is a 100 percent organic cotton flannel. Moms seem to love the softness next to their babies’ skin and are willing to pay a higher price for an organic cotton receiving blanket, cap, and booties from Lewis & Lee versus a nonorganic or blended flannel from their competition. Based on the success of their flannels, the company offered a second product line this past year: corduroy hats and booties lined in flannel. The products are quite sturdy and still have the softness of organic flannel next to the infant’s head and toes.

Finding a consistent quality of 100 percent organic cotton flannel available year-round in solids, prints, and matching yarn dyes at an affordable price is a real challenge. The responsibility of the Lewis & Lee fabric merchandiser, Kayla Woolsey, is to swatch, sample, and test fabrics from many different resources. The fabric tests performed are for shrinkage and colorfastness. Both finished garments and fabric squares are tested. When Kayla approves a quality, an order is placed. Most of the solids and basic prints are ordered three to five months in advance through a fabric distributor in Oregon. The lead times are long because the flannels are manufactured in China. This requires long-range planning, but it has been worth it for the ability to reorder the same color and prints throughout the year and the great price received when purchasing in large quantities.

One day while taking the fabric inventory of a recent shipment, Kayla discovered a fiber content label reading 60 percent organic cotton/40 percent polyester stuck inside one of the rolls of fabric. The fabric and color number on the tag was the same as the flannel she had been ordering for four seasons. After looking inside several more tubes, she discovered three more of these 60/40 content labels. She was shocked. Was there an error? She had order confirmations for 100 percent organic cotton flannel. Had she been sold 60 percent organic cotton/40 percent polyester goods all along with the assumption she would not know it was not 100 percent organic cotton? She immediately telephoned her fabric manufacturer in Portland to find out what was going on.

After a sleepless week of investigation, the situation became more complicated. Indeed, Lewis & Lee had been shipped from Oregon some 60/40 flannel on this and past orders. The fabric supplier had contracted for 100 percent organic cotton flannel from China and was unaware of the switch. Unfortunately, all current available solid red flannel would need to be the 60/40 blend. At this time, another concern was raised regarding the cotton: was it really organic? As there are no standards for labeling or international standards for methods of growing organic cotton, the owners of Lewis and Lee began to question if the cotton in their fabric was organic. They no longer trusted their fabric distributor and questioned the company’s integrity.

The owners of Lewis & Lee were outraged. Their company’s image was based on delivering an organic fiber product, not a blend like their competition. Also, all the garment labels sewn in the products and in the warehouse clearly stated 100 percent organic cotton. The owners knew that legally all textile products must be correctly labeled with the percentage of each fiber present listed in order of greatest percentage. With the new knowledge of the actual fiber content, all garments containing red and blue flannel in production and in stores were incorrectly labeled.

Case 68 TO GO OR TO STAY: ETHICS IN THE WORKPLACE

For Case 68: The way I see it, there are 4 possible solutions you can choose to argue for this situation:
1) Janet stays with the company and cancels the orders as she’s told.
2) Janet quits her job.  
3) Janet stays with the company, but goes against instructions and does not cancel the orders.
4) OR even better, can you come up with some kind of “out of the box” solution for this situation?

Major Question

What should Janice do?

Kitty Dickerson, University of Missouri

When Janice Heitler landed a job after graduation in the buyer training program at retailer BuyBest, she believed her career dreams were close to being fulfilled. Although she had limited experience with the company through an internship, she was particularly fortunate to be hired immediately into the BuyBest’s buying office. Typically, potential buyers spend at least two years in a BuyBest store before having an opportunity to go to the headquarter’s buying offices.

Janice plunged quickly into her work as a buyer trainee at BuyBest. Although she was given a relatively limited amount of training and guidance in her new job, Janice learned quickly. She soon earned the respect of her colleagues and the vendors with whom she worked. Before long, Janice was given limited opportunities to do some of the actual buying for her area. As her experience increased, so did her responsibilities for buying. In what was a relatively short period of time for a buyer in training, she was made buyer of her own area. Although this first buying area was relatively low profile, the multiple stores represented in the chain meant that the dollar volume for which she bought was fairly significant.

As Janice continued her successful performance, she was rewarded with higher-dollar-volume areas for which to buy. Within less than three years, she was buyer for two merchandise areas and was responsible for a staggering dollar volume for a person of her age and experience. Although somewhat uneasy at times because of her fast promotion, Janice continued to perform well. Her areas were successful, and she was a valued employee of BuyBest.

As the economy changed and consumer apparel expenditures declined, Janice’s satisfaction with her job began to wane. Although her own buying areas were doing reasonably well, the company as a whole was less profitable than in prior years. Many of BuyBest’s buyers had merchandise on order with manufacturers and found that consumer demand was not adequate to sell all the merchandise ordered. Many of Janice’s buyer peers canceled their orders with manufacturers.

As Janice’s buying areas began to show lackluster performance, she began to be pressured from her superiors to cancel orders for merchandise not yet shipped. She understood why her superiors wanted her to cancel the orders; however, she felt it was unethical treatment of the manufacturers with whom she had developed trusted relationships. Because Janice was buying a substantial volume of merchandise for the multiple stores in the BuyBest organization, she was sensitive to what this meant to those vendors. For many small suppliers, in particular, the volume she ordered could make or break the manufacturer. For those companies with whom she had placed orders, the fabrics and others supplies would have been purchased by the manufacturers, and in several cases, production was already in progress. This also would mean the manufacturer would have incurred labor costs at that point. In short, the losses associated with canceled orders from BuyBest could put some of her vendors out of business or seriously cripple them.

Janice found herself torn between her conscience and the expectations of her employer. To stay in her job, she must cancel orders to meet BuyBest’s financial expectations for her area. To do so, Janice knew she would be seriously hurting vendors with whom she had developed good relationships, and she had become friends with several. Additionally, she knew that she might need to place orders again with those companies—if they were still in business—and she was uncertain if they would sell to her again if she treated them in this manner.

Janice’s superiors were very much aware of the implications of canceled orders on vendors. They, too, were responding to pressure from their superiors. Janice could not be sure how high in the corporate structure the decisions were being made.

Janice saw some of her buyer peers leaving BuyBest. Although she was troubled by her dilemma, she knew she would not likely find another job with comparable opportunities at this stage in her career.

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Case Study #4

Immediate Problem:

Alternative Solution 1:

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Implementation & Time Frame:

Alternative Solution 2:

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Implementation & Time Frame:

Selected Alternative (1 or 2) and Justification:

Case Study #6

Immediate Problem:
Alternative Solution 1:
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Alternative Solution 2:
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Selected Alternative (1 or 2) and Justification:

Explanation of which of the 2 case studies will benefit most from your solution and why: