Yesterday, Hit Promotional Products, Largo, Fla., announced that it opened a new apparel facility in Bellmawr, N.J., just outside of Philaldelphia. We spoke with Marc Held, vice president of Hit Promotional Products, about the new facility and how he expects it to impact the business.
Promo Marketing: Could you tell me a little bit about this new facility?
Marc Held: It’s Hit Promotional Products’ second apparel decoration facility. We opened it up in conjunction with Admints [& Zagabor] over in Bellmawr, N.J. For us, it’s about reaching our customers even quicker and in a more timely manner. This gives us expanded UPS coverage range, it gives us much more capacity, and you combine the two—and we have well over 50,000 T-shirts a day between Largo and Philly—and I’m really excited about our manager, Megan Haines, who was on our press release, that she comes with over 20 years of experience, just brings an incredible amount of knowledge to decoration. Because that’s really what Hit does, we’re all about finding a solution and applying the best decoration method to that solution.
PM: What kind of impact do you think this will have on the overall business?
MH: We have plans for growth. We’re excited. We’ve really seen a strong growth in apparel over the last six months, especially the last four months. And we think that customers are looking for that one-stop shop, that one-invoice solution. When you think about apparel, they have to buy the T-shirts from somebody [and] they send them to get them decorated. We actually do the whole thing for them. We’ll grow our footprint in Philadelphia. Today we offer screen printing only, but we will add other decoration methods in 2017. We’ll walk before we run, but we’re excited. We’ve been open for about three weeks and we’re excited to grow and look forward to serving our customers.
PM: What other decoration methods will you add?
MH: I don’t know at one point and what time we’ll add [them], but direct-to-garment, embroidery for sure, some of the other features we do in Largo, which is our corporate headquarters. We do polybagging, tagging, relabeling, fulfillment, direct mail. Those are areas that we’re really good at. We’ll bring those capabilities and processes to our Bellmawr Admints facility in 2017. Not sure about the timeline, but direct-to-garment we’re doing now, you might see some embroidery is on the horizon, but it’ll probably be middle to end of 2017.
PM: How long has this new facility been in the plans?
MH: We’ve been thinking about it for about 3 months. It’s been a quick process. Who knows what the future will bring, but we’re excited about this one, and who knows what other footprints we might add?
Fore more information on Hit Promotional Products, visit www.hitpromo.net.
