Thirty-One Gifts, a personalized gift items manufacturer and distributor, opened in the former O-Cedar building at 1000 Titus Road with the promise of providing 500 jobs in three years in exchange for city tax incentives. The company is well on its way to meeting that goal.
Company officials held an employee appreciation event, attended by city and county officials, which capped with a tour of the new facility Thursday.
Tom Franzen, the city’s economic development director, said he was excited to see the O-Cedar building filled with local workers.
He said while multiple businesses have occupied the building, it has been difficult to find companies to take on the more than 300,000-square-foot facility.
“When you have logistics work like this, you don’t expect a large number of workers, but with the manufacturing component and logistics you can provide a large number of local jobs,” Franzen said. “It’s fun to see (O-Cedar) full of life and full of color.”
Employees from Thirty-One Gifts and their partner, Exel Logistics, gave Franzen and others a glimpse of how their items are personalized and sent to consultants across the country who sell the gifts.
Shipments of products — such as handbags, fashion accessories, totes and more — are received through a docking station and meticulously sorted and labeled based upon whether they will be monogrammed or not, said Don Larson, an Exel operations manager. Employees end up scanning every item that comes in.
The items and the label with the monogram is sent to employees in charge of four to six sewing machines, said Michelle Meier, a Thirty-One Gifts operations manager. It takes about two minutes to monogram each item. (The record for all of Thirty One Gifts is 826 bags were monogrammed by one employee in a 10-hour shift.)
The items are then packaged and sent to the consultant through a different loading dock on the other side of the building.
The former O-Cedar Factory has seen its fare share of products on its loading docks.
“I was here when O-Cedar built this factory,” Franzen said. The factory has “seen brooms and mops and international trucks, and now there’s ladies handbags.”
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