Exclusive PTC Corona Stories From Italy: Focus on New Client Needs and Markets

More that a year after the beginning of the pandemic, the 3rd Corona wave is still causing several disruptions in Europe. As PTC’s global umbrella organization, CINET has created a open-platform in which national associations, individual companies, suppliers and PTC professionals share their experiences and their view on the after-Corona future.

Courtesy of Assosecco, we have received a general image on the Retail Textile Cleaning sector in Italy in 2021 on 3 aspects: before and during the crisis, the possible scenarios, the “personal journey” towards the new future. Overall, as Gabriella Platé, Assosecco’s President underlined, in Italy the PTC sector has been hit by a very heavy crisis due to this pandemic. Companies in all domains have had to implement a series of measures and strategies to face a new reality and in many ways dangerous and full of unknowns.

 

Riccardo Ripamonti

The news came as we were returning from a week’s vacation: the laboratory and the shop had already begun to suffer the reduction of work. The official news of the business closures obviously worried us a lot.

We intervened on three fronts:

  1. securing employees, keeping them at home as a precaution to understand how to manage the emergency;
  2. starting immediately in the search for personal protective equipment such as masks and gloves, and the task was difficult in those times; we were also able to recover the equipment for the sanitation of the environments;
  3. Promptly intervening on the front of the recovery of financial resources, blocking, postponing or reducing current expenses; we had already guessed that it would be neither short nor easy.

I conclude by reporting two considerations, one for the past year and one for the current year.

In 2020 the biggest mistake was to foresee work in the summer period, thinking that people would recover the changes not made during the winter but, unfortunately, this did not happen and the work, at the end of the year, has shrunk considerably.

Perhaps the worst period is also the one we are preparing to live, full of uncertainties and above all with many people who have less financial resources.

 

 

Franco Pirocchi

Let’s try to analyze what in this year has deeply affected and marked our activities and which, to a certain extent, will have irreversible effects in the near future:

  • teleworking and smart working have locked up the middle class white-collar workers in their homes and teleconferences have put an end to travel;
  • online sales benefited from exponential growth, reducing the number of steps in supermarkets and shopping center galleries;
  • the death of a certain percentage of senior customers is not compensated by the younger groups;
  • the closure of many companies or their restructuring and the consequent loss of work, will cause a reduction in income;
  • the change of transversal habits in all social classes.

 

Francesco Riva

The Covid pandemic has certainly changed lifestyle habits and the way to use the service we offer: fewer trips to the laundry and with fewer clothes.

The reduction in volumes highlighted the latent criticalities of our sector:

  • too low prices;
  • turnover based mainly on a few items with a low contribution margin, especially shirts;
  • obsolete and oversized structures that have shown their low efficiency.

The positive aspect, however, was being face to face with these critical issues that have led many operators to deal with problems that they did not see or did not consider worrying.

We must therefore learn from our mistakes, expand the markets served by keeping as our objective the search for articles / services with a higher contribution margin; finally, in the face of lower volumes, we must try to improve our turnover / cost ratio.

 

Federico Cimini

Did COVID give us more than it took away?

Can the pandemic be traced back to a path of deep reflection with ourselves? It oppressed us with fear, it forced us to see our neighbor as enemies and it hit us physically even when we thought we had gotten away with it.

After a year, we find ourselves almost at the same point and if someone talks about hope, the goodness of vaccines, we want to insult him and we have become more prone to discussion, aggression, in many daily activities.

Even in the family, an important lifeline in these times of confusion, in many cases we have witnessed an increase in violence and misunderstanding.

The pandemic has really been able to bring out the worst in ourselves …

Yet, all these negative feelings do not belong to us, not in all human beings and not in this “quantity”, we were born to aim for the best and look at “the stars” and we cannot, we must not resign ourselves to a slow and inexorable decline.

The world is moving forward, some people have been able to seize the opportunities that inevitably lurk within a Crisis and not only have they started walking again, but they have even started running.

And then, we take our destiny in hand, we reflect on what needs to be changed, we use this moment to cut what belongs to the past and is no longer able to be useful for the new future and we begin to be lighter, more flexible and get used to measure the small steps, without dropping the crumbs that can be very useful during our new path.