Behind the Scenes: Our Warehouse

Whether you place your Bas Bleu orders by phone, web, or mail, all of your purchases are carefully packed and shipped to you by our warehouse team in Hudson, Ohio. Our 57,000-square-foot warehouse--which we share with our sister brands What on Earth and Daedalus--is home to approximately 14,000 unique SKUs ("stock keeping units"), the products all organized and stored with dizzying efficiency on some of the tallest "bookshelves" we've ever seen! The facilities are state of the art when it comes to machinery and technology, but it's the terrific people behind the scenes who make it all possible.

On any given day, you'll find our warehouse crew loading shelves, sorting stock, packing orders, processing return shipments, and checking (and double-checking) the contents of each box before it's loaded onto a truck. No fewer than six people touch an order as it wends through our warehouse: "Stops" along the way include picking (where an order's individual items are collected), checking (order contents are verified), box exchange (products transferred into a shippable box), packing (obviously!), manifest (shipping labels scanned), and truck loader (see ya!). We also have folks dedicated to receiving deliveries of new stock, processing customer returns, and finishing (adding any "extra" packaging to stock, like bundling note cards or labeling garments with size stickers), plus vehicle operators and stock keepers loading and unloading shelves.

Processing orders is a lot of work, and most of the year it's carried out by a skilled and efficient staff of twenty-one full-time employees. But when the holiday season ramps up, so does our warehouse crew! In 2018, we added an astonishing 110 seasonal workers and a second shift to pack your orders. Could we add a third shift? Probably! But we believe our employees deserve a healthy work-life balance. We also pride ourselves on paying a living wage. In fact, we've upgraded our warehouse pay twice over the past few years in order to stay competitive, and we offer medical and retirement benefits to all of our full-time employees. We also aim to treat every employee with dignity and respect. As a result, we experience very little turnover in our warehouse staff, and we have a large number of seasonal employees who return year after year to help out during the holiday rush.

In the warehouse, every set of hands is critical. During the 2018 holiday season, reports Director of Operations Brian Madonna, "our dedicated team worked every day of the week from Thanksgiving until December 22. We didn't leave a single order behind because we wanted our customers to receive their order before Christmas. I never heard an employee complain about the number of hours or how many consecutive days they worked. We take great pride in the number of packages that we ship from Thanksgiving to Christmas." (A little birdie told us that our CEO was spotted working in the warehouse in December, lending a hand on busy evenings after his daytime "office shift" was over.)

But lest you think our warehouse is all work and no play, our crew enjoys perks like a hefty employee discount and monthly cookouts, where we serve hamburgers, hot dogs, and bratwursts alongside potluck side dishes whipped up by the employees. When asked what skills our employees provide that machinery cannot, Madonna says, "Plain and simple it's the human touch: ensuring that the product is correct, it's in great shape, and if it needs to be gift wrapped that it looks outstanding and that every package is packed properly for the final journey."

Our warehouse employees are essential members of the Bas Bleu team, critical to the success of our company and to the satisfaction of our customers. The next time you open a box from us, rest assured knowing it was packed not by a robot, but by a valued member of the Bas Bleu family.