even when you’re on the look-out for it, it’s startling to see thelarge head of a Mickey Mouse sil-

houette come into view amidst the veryrural landscape of Highway 176 inJonesville, SC.

The larger-than-life icon adorns thefront of the 500,000-square-foot world-wide fulfillment center for Disney Shop-ping Inc., the online shopping destinationfor The Walt Disney Company. DisneyShopping has grown so much that last year,when online sales reached 80 percent vs.catalog sales of 20 percent, the companydiscontinued its catalog and shifted to a100 percent Internet-based sales model.

All genuine (non-licensed) Disneymerchandise, from apparel, watches and

beach towels to toys, movies and jew-elry, comes through this highly auto-mated state-of-the-art facility on its wayto homes around the world.

“Everything shipped is a one-off, asingle customer order,” says Joe Kiley,senior manager, facilities and engi-neering. “Everything we pick and shipis done on a piece level, not on a caselevel. No one orders 36 Goofy shirts,”he says.

Last year, the facility processed 9 mil-lion items for individual customers, or“guests,” as they are referred to by thecompany.

APRIL 2007 • www.apparelmag.com

systems at a glance• Conveyors: Rapistan• Embroidery: Melco Amaya • Monogramming: Barudan Meistergram• Sorters: Crisplant S-3000E Tilt-Tray Sorter• Wireless Networking for Embroidery,

Lettering: VeriStitch• WMS: DCMS (precursor to Manhattan

Associates’ PkMS)

With RF-enabledtechnology fromVeriStitch and a newin-house embroiderydepartment, Disneyhas put creative powerin the hands of itscustomers.

Disney offers monogramming on a widevariety of items. The princess backpackwas extremely popular for back-to-school 2006. A small percentage ofpersonalization is done with engravingand sublimation, such as on thisleather notebook.

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Making it personalThe Jonesville distribution center is

also home to the company’s monogram-ming, engraving and sublimation oper-ations. Of the 9 million items processedat the facility last year, 1 million trav-eled through the Personalization Depart-ment (PZ), situated on the warehousefloor midway between the automatedCrisplant sorters and the pick-to-cart stag-ing area.

Launched in 1998 — the same yearthat Disney’s fulfillment operations weremoved from Memphis, TN, to their cur-rent location — the PZ started small, with12 Barudan Meistergram 900 XLC zigzagmonogramming machines.

Since that time, the company has grownsignificantly, and along with it, the demandfor personalization, says Kiley. “[The oppor-tunity to personalize] makes our productsunique from something you can buy atWal-Mart,” he says.

Indeed. A wide range of products, frompolo shirts to sweatshirts and kids’ back-packs to watches, can be personalized withnames, about 95 percent of which arestitched. (Disney does not charge its cus-tomers for personalization.)

Additionally, in February, Disney Shop-ping took its personalization offerings ahuge step forward, adding embroideryoptions to its monogramming services,and expanding the ways in which cus-tomers can individualize their Disneymerchandise.

Now, in addition to personalizing prod-uct with their names, customers can, forexample, create their own Disney polo byselecting the shirt color, the particular Dis-ney character to be embroidered andthe thread color and font for monogram-ming. By the time the holiday season hits

this year, the company expects to extendthis level of customization to the bulk ofits products that can be embroidered.

Seasonal spikes maketraining tough

Personalization is a huge draw for thecustomer, but as is often the case with cus-tomization, it adds a layer of difficulty tothe process, and Disney’s operations areno exception.

Over the years, the PZ expanded toaccommodate growth, adding 38 mono-gramming machines to bring the total to50, but it continued to confront a numberof challenges that stymied efficiency andadded to production costs.

Many of its challenges stemmed fromthe fact that sales at Disney Shopping areextremely seasonal; personalization nat-urally follows the same trend. Steady salesthroughout the year spike to unbelievablelevels come October, when holiday shop-

ping begins. And it doesn’t creep up gen-tly. It comes in with a bang, says JenniferHicks, engineering manager.

Last year, for example, the PZ wentfrom monogramming 5,000 units per weekto more than 80,000 units per week in thespace of just four weeks. During the hol-iday season, the monogramming machinesare kept busy around the clock — threeeight-hour shifts keep them running 24/7.

The entire facility, which employsapproximately 150 hourly workers throughmost of the year, ramps up to more than700 when the holiday season rolls around.The PZ experiences the largest growth toits base staff, percentage-wise, expand-ing from about 15 employees year roundto 300 employees during the peak period.(Disney refers to its employees as “castmembers.”)

www.apparelmag.com • APRIL 2007

Disney puts creative power in the handsof its guests at Disneyshopping.com.

IT’S ALL PART OF THE DISNEY FAMILY

Disney Shopping, formerly called Disney

Direct, is a business of The Walt Dis-

ney Co., which had $34.3 billion in

revenue last year.

The Walt Disney Co. is divided into

four major business segments: Media

Networks ($14.6 billion), Parks and

Resorts ($9.9 billion), Studio Entertain-

ment ($7.5 billion) and Consumer Prod-

ucts ($2.2 billion). Disney Shopping,

which operates the online store at

DisneyShopping.com, is part of the

Consumer Products Division.

Disney Consumer Products is one

of the largest licensors in the world. It is

divided into Disney Hardlines, Disney

Softlines and Disney Toys. It also includes

Disney Publishing (Hyperion Books for

Children, Disney Press and Disney Edi-

tions, as well as the children’s magazine,

Disney Adventures). Other businesses in

this division include Buena Vista Games

and The Baby Einstein Co.

Disney Stores, which also falls under

the Consumer Products Division, sold

most of its U.S. stores in 2004 to The

Children’s Place. But, under the terms

of a contract between The Children’s

Place and The Walt Disney Co., the

web site www.disneystore.com will redi-

rect guests to DisneyShopping.com until

sometime this year, when The Children’s

Place will acquire the DisneyStore.com

domain. At that point, the two compa-

nies may form an agreement to join

forces on certain aspects of their web

businesses.

“[The opportunity to personalize]makes our products unique fromsomething you can buy at Wal-Mart,” says Joe Kiley, seniormanager, facilities and engineering

Disney Shopping.

From a training perspective,that used to present Disney withan enormous challenge each year.

Disney’s monogramming pro-cedures were complex. Each itemto be monogrammed was routedwith its own processing card, ina tote, to the PZ. There, an oper-ator identified the style on the cardand flipped through a 100-plus-page three-ring binder tolocate the particular spec-ifications for that style.

“You had to find theitem in the book to fig-ure out the thread color,the font, the size of thelettering, horizontal spac-ing, vertical spacing, line spac-ing, stitch count, sewing speed,width and orientation of the item inthe machine,” says Kiley.

Once located, all of this information hadto be keyed into the Meistergram for eachorder, along with the person’s name tobe monogrammed. This took time, and itwas also highly prone to errors from “fatfingering,” especially at the pace at whichthe department was moving, says Hicks.(Also, Disney was using cumbersome hoopsto position items on the machines. It nowuses more efficient clamps to hold materi-als in place.)

Compounding the difficulty was the needto train a huge group of employees eachyear, which was a time-intensive process. Itrequired approximately two weeks to trainoperators “so they could even be left bythemselves, and four to six weeks beforethey could get up to speed” — basically thelength of the holiday season, she says.

As such, the department would hire sea-sonal employees to train before the rush— adding to its labor costs — so that the PZwould be efficient by the time the ordersstarted pouring in.

Streamlining operationsAs the demand for personalization grew,

the company’s leadership recognized thatit needed to improve its procedures.

In 2004, Disney purchased the Veri-Stitch Direct-to-Sew™ solution to help

speed and streamline operations. It has —in spades. In fact, the $200,000 system paidfor itself in three months, Kiley says.

How so? VeriStitch allows Disney tobypass the manual process of keying infor-mation into the monogramming machineby interfacing directly with the company’sonline order entry system.

Each job order is matched in the com-pany’s server with its own job number,which includes all of the information nec-essary for the monogramming machine toperform the operation, including the tem-plates for each style.

The operator simply scans the pro-cessing card with a handheld RF reader,which automatically queries the server and

downloads all of the job’s speci-fications and the customer’s namedirectly into the machine. Then theoperator positions the product onthe machine and starts the embroi-dery cycle.

This has eliminated the searchthrough the binder and the man-ual keying process, which has sig-nificantly boosted productivity. Italso has eliminated keying errors,which has reduced product qual-ity problems by half, says Kiley.

But the biggest benefit, by far, he says, isthe reduction in the training cycle.

What used to take four to six weeks isdown to two to three days, says Hicks.

The Direct-to-Sew solution has pro-vided other significant benefits. Previously,for example, there was no accurate wayto determine the run-time of the machines,or who monogrammed what. “How well[the employees] did was completely self-declared,” says Hicks.

The new system has improved produc-tivity tracking by “leaps and bounds,” allow-ing for true accountability, she says. That,in turn, has made it possible to set upperformance standards based on each style.

The ability to track production also has,if not completely eliminated, somewhatshrunk the PZ “black hole” by allowingincreased visibility into the possible loca-tion of product in that department. The PZis the one place in the fulfillment facilitywhere the WMS system “loses sight” of theproduct, and where it is possible for thatproduct to “get lost.”

Now, the VeriStitch system allows somevisibility into product whereabouts — help-ful during holiday season when thousandsof totes are stacked as far and wide as theeye can see. “You’re looking out at a sea oftotes,” says Kiley.

Before the implementation of the sys-tem, one tote accidentally placed out oforder would be virtually impossible to locate.But “with VeriStitch you can say, ‘Has any-one run this unit?’ [If someone has,] it’llsay, ‘Yes, Joe just logged it in here.’ Previ-ously you would not know that,” says Kiley.“And if it hasn’t been monogrammed, youfeel better about doing a re-run,” he adds.

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Disney’s newest customizationservice allows shoppers to cre-ate their own Disney polo shirts.The company’s new MelcoAmaya embroidery machines,

equipped with VeriStitch tech-nology, allow Disney to quickly

embroider both Disney charactersand lettering on the same garment.

The company’s personalization departmentcustomized 1 million items last year.

Expanding customizationHaving mastered monogramming, Dis-

ney recently decided to diversify its cus-tomization options into embroidery.Needing quick-turn capabilities and theability to do one-offs, the company is bring-ing its embroidery operations in-house,rather than having product embroidereden masse in Asia.

PZ is now home to six brand new Melco16-needle Amaya embroidery machines.Although not as fast as the powerful zigzagmonogramming machines, they are moreversatile, capable of handling mono-gramming and embroidery on one machine.

Disney is launching this new portionof its operations with a big leg up, har-nessing the lessons learned from its mono-gramming operations to develop a systemfor its embroidery operations that will min-imize cycle time and training time, andallow operators to hit the ground running.

As such, Disney is working with Veri-Stitch and Melco to integrate the Direct-

to-Sew system with the embroiderymachines. Templates for monogrammingwill be similar to those for the Meister-gram. Digitized Disney characters, a bitmore complex, also will be pre-formattedinto the VeriStitch database.

This will allow the operator to simplyscan a bar code and place the item in themachine. Both operations, monogram-ming and embroidery, will be in one “sewjob,” and will run at once. There will beno need for three-ring binders or keyingof information into the system.

At press time, Disney was putting thefinishing touches on the first group of dig-itized characters and was set to roll outthe first of its new customization options:“Create Your Own Disney Polo,” whichwill be initially offered with 17 characters,and shortly thereafter with more than 30.Similar campaigns will follow, and likelythe need for more embroidery machines.

Because all of the machines commu-nicate through RF technology, with no

cables or wires affixing them to the floor,it is easy to rearrange machinery in thePZ to accommodate changes in volume,personnel or additional machinery, whichmakes for the most productive and leanworking environment, says Kiley.

And what of the 50 Meistergrams?Some items, such as printed beach tow-

els, simply do not lend themselves well toembroidery. Products that require onlymonogramming will continue to run on theMeistergrams. “There will always be someuse for the machine,” says Kiley. How muchis still an unknown.

“We don’t know yet, as a business, ifwe’re going to cannibalize the mono-gramming with the embroidery, or if it’sjust going to be an add-on,” says Kiley.

But expectations are high. “People loveto have the opportunity to differentiatethemselves,” he concludes. n

Jordan K. Speer is senior editor of Apparel.She can be reached atjspeer@apparelmag.com.

coverstory

Reprinted from the April 2007 issue of Apparel. © Edgell Communications, Inc. For more information about reprints from Apparel, contact PARS International Corp. at 212-221-9595.