Real-Life Decision Making
Millinery is a forgiving profession. A wrong choice in design or material
may not have a significant impact on the bottom line.
"With a certain amount of experience and familiarity with the material,
[an error] is not an expensive problem," says Wayne Wichern. He is a milliner
in Seattle. He says that wrong design decisions may actually improve the final
product.
"An error often points me in a new design direction," he says. "So [an
error] can be fortuitous a lot of the time, but not when you are in hurry
to get something done, and it is not going right."
But milliners must be decisive when they deal with money and customer relations.
It is a small industry, and reputations matter a lot.
You are a milliner. A client wants you to make a hat for a wedding. She
wants you to make it out of the same cloth as her dress, so that
her hat and her dress match perfectly.
But there are problems right from the start. You and your client have a
difficult time understanding each other over how the hat will look like. But
the hat is eventually done, and your client is ready to pick up her hat from
your shop.
As you write her bill, she asks you to lower the price on the basis that
she paid for part of the material. But this condition was part of the original
agreement. What do you do?