Tales Of A Fourth Generation Textile Executive: Justice Has Been Served
This is a follow up blog to one I wrote on September 21, 2015 entitled, “There Are No Shortcuts In Life.” The gist of the blog was about people stealing fabrics from the Jaftex companies, what they did with the fabric and the ultimate consequences. Here is the follow up. 
In particular, I am referring to the situation where a customer of the SNS North Warehouse was allegedly in cahoots with some of the plant employees (they have been fired). They worked together and were stealing our fabrics, shipping them directly to their own customers and getting paid for it. The selling price to the shop was $1.40 per yard which is so unbelievable because that is significantly below our real cost and even below where we sell closeouts. To not realize that something is fishy here with prices so low, you would really have to be a total idiot. Like the saying goes, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” Obviously, it was too good to be true and I would have to say this store owner knew good and well what he was doing. Moreover, this probably wasn’t his first time doing this….just another person looking for a shortcut and claiming ignorance.
In any case, when I first found out about this, I contacted the store owner in question. After the owner tried to claim that he had no idea the goods were stolen, he did decide to cooperate and help us collect evidence against the real criminals which was nice of him. While the investigation went on however, I asked the fabric store owner to take the fabric off his shelves because I didn’t want him hurting our reputation by selling the fabric below $3.00 (a ridiculously low price). So now everything is all good and well and the investigation is on to find the real culprits. So I contact the store owner again more recently to find out from him that he sold all the 200 plus bolts of our fabric….at $2.99/yard. The owner assumed the situation had been resolved and he could sell the fabrics now. DUH!
In my mind, this was certainly not resolved, and I was shocked how foolish this guy was to have sold the stolen goods in question after all that he had learned about the situation. So my legal cap came on and I told him that he made a very bad move. I explained to him that he is killing our brand name, making all of our legitimate, full-price paying customers in his area furious with us and he would have to pay the price for what he did. Long story short, I was so pleased to come back from the new year with a nice settlement check sitting on my desk. To me, that was confirmation that this guy know he did wrong. That all being said, it doesn’t help all of our hard working legitimate quilt shop customers that have suffered due to others who have cheated.
There is a lot to learn from this.
1. There are no shortcuts in life.
2. Stealing and cheating doesn’t pay.
3. If you see something, say something. To all the shop owners out there, if you hear people are selling our newest lines of fabrics at way below market prices, you need to let us know asap. We would never do anything like this to harm you. We value all of you tons and are sorry that you have been damaged. Hopefully we have put an end to this.
4. If you try to cheat any of our companies, I will be sure to go after you by all means necessary. We will not tolerate this behavior.
Until Next Week,
This is no-stealing Scott