Shirts and pins

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32869, 18 March 1972, Page 18

Shirts and pins

(N.Z. Press Association)

AUCKLAND, Mar. 17.

It is not the shirt makers who get the money in New Zealand but the manufacturers of pin and packaging, says an American shirt company executive, Mr L. Stengel. He was commenting on the practice of packing shirts in fancy boxes, and supporting them with pins, plastic and cardboard.

“It seems to me that this extra packaging is costing anywhere from 50c to a dollar,” he said.

“In the United States about 95 per cent of shirts come in polyethylene bags, and no-one seems to mind. They might object if their shirts went up a dollar to pay for a pretty box, though,” he said.

If manufacturers and retailers could get together and do away with elaborate packing shirts would be up to a dollar cheaper, he said. But his company, Manhattan, would not take the initiative.

Mr Stengel said that to present shirts in plastic bags with a minimum of dressing would not affect sales. It certainly had made no different in the United States, where boxed shirts had made only a token appearance at Christmas.

“Here you put the shirt in a box, poke about 12 pins into it, stiffen it up with plastic and cardboard, and the only people who benefit are the pinmakers and packaging people,” he said.