Flying High

With the passage of a standard for high-visibility garments, the market for safety apparel has taken off, launching a potentially lucrative niche for decorators.
March 01, 2004

At least two or three times a week, Andrea Cancellieri turns on the local evening news in her New York home and sees everyone from snow plow operators to traffic guards wearing lime green or fluorescent orange jackets crisscrossed with shimmering stripes of reflective tape.

Cancellieri, the national sales coordinator at Elmsford, NY-based manufacturer Game Sportswear, knows these sightings aren't chance occurrences. Rather, they are highly visible evidence of the building momentum in the market for safety apparel products.

"It's unbelievable the number of requests we receive daily for reflective apparel," Cancellieri says. "We literally can't keep some of our safety products on the shelves. We have to fly them in; we can't wait for the ship to come in."

Since the late 1990s, an awareness for the need of safety apparel worn by everyone from airport ground crews to crossing guards has skyrocketed, opening a potentially lucrative niche for decorators. And the resulting safety apparel market surge is showing no signs of relenting.

Rick Cesere, executive vice president of sales of Hartwell Industries, an apparel manufacturer based in Hartwell, Ga., says sales of the company's safety apparel line, Auburn Safety Net, have increased by 50% since its launch in early 2003. The line also has expanded from six to 18 styles in that time period.

Game and Hartwell are not alone on the safety apparel bandwagon, either. In the past six months, several other big league manufacturers, such as Hanes, Jerzees and Gildan, have begun actively promoting T-shirts in the safety hues of lime green and fluorescent orange.

"A recognition has begun in the marketplace of the big demand for safety products," Cesere says. "I think it's been driven by a combination of liability and an increased awareness of the need for safety. It seems every four or five months, a state trooper has someone pulled over and a car smashes into him. The awareness and the demand is just increasing and increasing," he says.

On the Rise

Perhaps the greatest impetus for this increase in awareness and usage of safety apparel products came in 1999 with the passage of the American National Standard for High-Visibility Safety Apparel by the American National Standard Institute Inc. (ANSI) and The Safety Equipment Association (ISEA). The standard, ANSI/ISEA 107-1999, provides recommended performance specifications for background and reflective materials, reflective material placement as well as testing method and care labeling guidelines for safety apparel. Its creation also provided a wake-up call for most manufacturers who, until that point, had not recognized the sleeping giant of safety apparel.

Although the standard is currently voluntary, organizations such as the Department of Transportation have adopted it and set timetables for its imposition. As a result, many safety apparel manufacturers and decorators have come to look upon the standard's passage into federal law as a question of not if, but when.

"The standard is out there, and there's no place for corporations to hide," says Rich Boven, president of the Reflective Apparel Factory in Marietta, Ga. "As [the standard] switches over into law, it's going to gain momentum. There will be confusion at first and people will be fined, but, ultimately, it will almost feed upon itself."

So what will all this mean for decorators? Well, money for starters.

"All workers who are employed outside, and, in some cases, inside, are going to have to be compliant to the standard when it comes down, so there's a lot of money involved," Boven says. "Insurance companies, lawsuits and employers' concern for their employees are going to drive changeover because it no longer will be acceptable for clothes to be non-compliant."

Tapping into Safety

So, there's a market for safety apparel but is there room for decorators? Cesere is certain there is. He estimates that 95% of the safety apparel Hartwell sells is decorated before it reaches the end user.

Still, the role of decorators in the safety apparel market is largely confined to personalization. That is, affixing company and organization names or logos through screen printing or sublimation processes, or embroidering company logos and employees' names and titles.

Get Safety Savvy

Another option for decorators is to buy blank safety garments and apply retroreflective materials to meet ANSI requirements. While this process allows decorators to add more value and thus increase profit margins, Boven warns that it is not easily mastered and requires knowledge of ANSI garment specifications.

Although there are a number of concerns for decorators eager to test the safety apparel waters, finding customers isn't one of them. Every city in the United States, regardless of size, has a water, fire, police and parks department as well as road construction, waste management and delivery companies—all of which have been told that their employees should be wearing safety apparel.

The waste industry is currently the largest purchaser of safety apparel, Boven says, followed by road construction companies and municipal and state governments. While these groups represent the bulk of customers in the safety apparel market, a host of other opportunities exist.

Airports, schools, lawn care companies, delivery drivers, cable and telephone installers, emergency crews and warehouse workers are all potential buyers. And the possibilities don't end there.

"There's a big opportunity out there, and I don't think the needs for safety apparel have been addressed yet," Cesere says. "It may just take a little bit of selling. Decorators should talk to police departments, state and municipal governments and make sure they are capturing any opportunities."

When shopping decorated safety apparel, the contact person varies depending on the type and size of the organization or company. Most municipal and state governments have purchasing departments that control what supplies are purchased. They can tell you if and when they are in the market for safety products.

At large companies, safety and compliance officers, who are in charge of maintaining and improving working conditions, are prime targets for your safety apparel pitch. However, if the target company is small, the owner will likely play a central role in purchasing decisions and should be approached with potential contracts.

A Different Ballgame

While the ANSI standard is perhaps the single greatest factor spurring the safety apparel market along, the construction guidelines and regulations contained within it represent a number of hurdles for decorators to clear. The standard has established rigorous testing guidelines and specific construction requirements that make safety apparel not only relatively expensive but difficult to decorate as well.

"In order to be ANSI-complaint, garments will cost more even though there's a huge amount of downward pressure in the market as more people get in," Boven says. "The reality is the end users of vests and safety apparel are used to paying incredibly low prices—$2 or $3 for a vest—and now an ANSI-approved vest, at the low end of the market, costs closer to $8 or $10. Safety is going to come at a cost."

Boven, for one, believes the relatively exorbitant cost of ANSI-compliant products might deter decorators from entering the market.

"Many decorators are used to buying blanks, printing them and then selling the blank and the print job—and that's not how this is going to work," he says. "Since ANSI-approved garments are more expensive, there is a different level of risk. A T-shirt costs a dollar, and if you print it and make a mistake, it's a small mistake. We do ANSI-III jackets and the entire sale is $38 or $39, and if decorators are just putting a $1 or $2 name personalization on it, there's a much greater amount of risk for the percentage of the deal they're involved in."

The standard has established detailed specifications for area of background fabric and retroreflective materials that must be met for a product to pass inspections. Retroreflective trim— either tape or ink—is required for low-light and nighttime visibility and is needed in increasing levels as you go up through class levels.

More than half of the ANSI-approved products that the Reflective Apparel Factory produces are personalized, Boven says, and because of the costly prices of safety apparel raw goods, it behooves his decorators to be extremely careful during fabrication. One of his greatest concerns is protecting retroreflective materials.

"If you take a compliant garment and screen print it and run it through a T-shirt dryer, it doesn't make the garment non-compliant, but it starts to deteriorate the retroreflective materials, which could cause it to be noncompliant later on," Boven explains. "Retroreflective material is really glass beads in an adhesive layer impregnated onto the surface of the garment, so when a high heat source is introduced for a second time, you're going to affect the chemistry."

To avoid damaging the retroreflective materials, Boven uses heat seal equipment to apply decoration to a controlled area rather than heating up the entire garment. Another option, Boven says, is using heat transferable materials applied at lower temperatures, decreasing the likelihood that retroreflective materials are damaged.

But because of the considerable insurance savings generated by safety apparel, Boven believes the products could and should bring a premium—good news for decorators who recognize safety apparel opportunity but worry about its profitability.

"The higher the stakes become in terms of liability, the less expensive ANSI-compliant garments are going to look," he says. "Everyone is going to need them—it's as simple as that."

Cesere agrees. "The only trend that I see in the future is that the market is going to continue to grow. (Safety apparel) is here to stay."