Episode 248: The People Behind the Merch: Jorge Herrera, Hirsch

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How often do you think about the people who make your merch? The hundreds, maybe thousands of people behind the orders, projects, shipments, and deliveries. We thought we'd pause this week to share a very special story. One story of the many stories in our industry The story of Jorge Herrera, otherwise known as George. Jorge began working for Hirsch in 2010, straight out of high school, after meeting Hirsch Vice President Paul Hirsch on the soccer field. He started as a production assistant, and after 12 years of mastering every machine in the building, from the print machines to the forklift, he's now the lead production manager. Jorge, or George, is an integral asset to the back of house at Hirsch. And according to Director of Sales and Marketing Brittany Frazee, he still makes the best box of anyone on the floor. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, Commscue's Chief Content Officer. Mark Graham, Commscue's co-founder and president, and Dave Schultz, Commscue's Vice President of Supplier Partnerships, and I, we went on a Texas tour from Houston to Austin to Dallas, hosting dinners with our friends in the Commscue community each evening, and by day, visiting our supplier friends and partners over at Chameleon-like, and also folks like the Hirsch team, which included President and Founder Peter Hirsch, Vice President Paul Hirsch, Director of Sales and Marketing Brittany Frazee, National Account Manager Josh Pospisil, and Marketing Manager Amanda Delaney. We captured this audio from the factory floor. The voices you hear are those I just mentioned, but the two most prominent voices you'll hear besides mine and Mark's are Warhays' and Peter's. At Hirsch, they call their team that produces their merch Team Kaizen. Kaizen, as many of you know, translates to continuous improvement. I hope you feel the energy of the spirit as we share with you Warhej's story. Today's episode is brought to you by Commenscue, the work-from-anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling both distributors and suppliers to process more orders easily dramatically grow your sales. To learn more, visit commonscue.com. Now here's the story of Jorge Herrera.

So, Mark, we plan this big Texas tour. We land in Houston, Texas. The first thing we do is we go visit the Hirsch factory. We walk in the door, we meet Brittany, Peter, Paul, Amanda, Josh, and the team. And as we chat, the next step was for us to actually tour the factory, and we meet a guy named George.

How you doing? Hi, George.

Hi, how are you? Nice to meet you.

Welcome to Hirsch.

Uh, system production manager.

I'm working in the company. Thank you. 12 years here. Started off in the tables, worked myself up. Child. Yeah, child, right? I don't look like a recruit.

Well, let me just start off. You know, I recruit a lot. I play a lot of soccer. Oh, so I was like, you know, we're looking for a production— somebody to join our production team. A very young guy out of high school, and he was playing soccer with me. I was like, you're a nice guy, why don't you come and work for us?

Sure.

This is like, what is that, uh, how many years ago?

It's been 12 years. I'm gonna have to say he is. Well, maybe now because he hasn't played. At 5:30 we could talk about it.

No, okay. George came out, huge smile across his face, big hearty handshakes, and a huge amount of enthusiasm for giving us a tour around his home. This is where he spent the better part of a decade building his career. He started off, I think he said that he didn't know anything about production or anything about this industry or anything about pad printing or laser engraving and how he got so immersed into this. And he was absolutely captivating as he showed us around. And that was the first thing that came to mind. And I think the second thing was, is that the people in the factory, I think, genuinely enjoyed what they were doing and felt that there was a craftsmanship component to this that I think that many of us take for granted. When you're ordering a speaker or ordering a piece of drinkware and it's got a logo on it, I think a lot of us think, well, it's produced in a place where it's done quickly and people who just want to get the job done and it's not particularly exciting work. I've certainly felt like that in the past and I've had that impression and that was the exact opposite of what we experienced. And so there was a cultural thing happening there that really jumped out in terms of how this family of of people were working and producing these items and a real care for what was happening.

This used to be our main production room. What happened was we grew faster than we expected, so we had to turn this into our machine room mostly. So most of the machines are in here. We started when we first were here in 2014, 2015, I think when we started. It was like, I think, 30 or 40 people. Right now we're we're about 80, and in peak season we're about 100, 110, more or less, with our seasonal people coming through. But this is where we have our machines. I'm gonna start right here with the one behind you.

Something I really appreciated watching— and this happens almost every time you go on a factory tour, but particularly at Hirsch because there's such a meticulous attention to hands-on detail. And so we often— I think maybe we depersonalize our projects and orders, you know, they just sort of sometimes seem to happen magically and they appear to our customers, and we don't realize that there's this entire group of folks whose passion and care is about mining the details and an incredible amount of pride in craftsmanship. At one moment, George introduced us to the first printer that he worked on and how he learned the business.

So this will be our papery machines. We start out with papery and Hirschgift. That's when I started off. It was patterning and laser engraving. We mostly focused on what's like keychains, pens, that sort of thing, which we had great orders, 50 pieces here, 100 pieces there, or, you know, it wasn't that big of a deal. But when we got it, we were very passionate about it. We mastered it to the point now that first, um, in the busy season runs about 4 to 5 machines in patterning just to the output, the quality. We got really proficient at it. When I started off, um, as a worker, this was one of the main machines that I started off on. It is kind of a pain to learn just because there's so many variables— heights, widths, curves, and all that. But once you master it, you kind of get the general engineering aspect of everything, of printing in general. So it makes all the machines a lot more easier. This is done manually. When you do it something more digital, if you see the big time difference, obviously technology helps a lot. But I think in this sense, you know, the machine has helped me personally understand what production is all together.

That's cool.

Each machine can pump you about 800 to 900 pieces per day on a 10-hour day in the busy season, which is not bad. You multiply times 5, you know, it's great. Right now we are using it mostly for our items that we have that require the silicone ink or any kind of text.

There is this real attention to detail and I think a commitment to getting it done right. I know that there was one machine that he stopped at where there was— it was a laser engraving machine. And they were lasering this, this bottle that had all these bevels around it. And conventional thinking is that if you were to do this in a traditional way, you would just be looking for that one flat part of the piece of drinkware and to put your logo. And if you— the flat parts were— the surface area is quite small. So if you stuck with just laser engraving on the flat part, your logo might be an inch wide max. Maybe 0.75 inches wide. But in their case, it was something like 2.5 inches wide because they were able to go across the bevels. And again, as someone that's probably sold that mug countless times back in my distributor days, I wouldn't have really thought anything of it. I just thought, okay, great, that just gets done. But he stopped us there and he's like, no, this is why this is so hard. And the logo could get distorted. And it's really, really important to us that it goes perfectly across the bevels. And I was looking at it and seeing the enthusiasm in his eyes. Yeah. And I could see that there was some frustration that was probably in there too, because he's like, I probably destroyed a number of bottles in trying to get this right. To me, that's when it really clicked. It really clicked that we were in the home of someone that really took this seriously and was not mailing it in.. And, and that to me was fascinating. Like, I, I won't ever forget that particular interaction. I won't look at a bottle with a bevel this quite the same way ever again.

Right. Not only that, at the end of our tour when he said goodbye, I don't know if you remember this, but he said, uh, I gotta go back to my homework. You guys interrupted my homework. He was studying how to imprint on a new, with a new piece of equipment on a new process. And that was his, what he was doing that day. And what we sort of interrupted is we crashed, but also I loved their attention to color and detail. So you're saying that's so great because you sort of cut your teeth or learned on this, you were able to understand production process in general?

In general, just like, I mean, in regards to output, in regards what you need to, you know, to have, uh, what the customer is looking for. I mean, sometimes it's so intricate, so little, that every minor detail to every specific or different, uh, customer counts. So, you know, but one of the big biggest, I guess, learning things that I have was, you know, colors for yellow, like a yellow, the yellow Yellow McDonald's, the yellow shell pectin, you know, it's one of the most complicated colors. And if you duplicate on top of each other, it changes color. Or if you, you add a little bit, whatever, it changes color. That's just on the color process because you have to do everything manual here. So you're fixing up the color.

If you open up that shelf, Brittany, uh, he knew his numbers and he knew the challenges with color, and the— and quality is such a crucial factor. But here was— here's what was the most impressive thing and why we thought we would bring this story to our SkewCast community is because the element of pride that they have in producing our work, your work, is astonishing to me. And let me give you an example. You know, when you're in sales and you're in this business and you have a big client and they place a reorder, you know, it's like, ka-ching, here comes the money, right? You didn't have to think about it. That's when you have one of those moments in business where you're like, this is amazing. I got a reorder for practically doing nothing. And even though it's not quite the case, it's just sweet when those come in. It's— it was fascinating to me that on the floor of the factory they celebrate reorders too, but they celebrate it this way.

Right. Plus we pride ourselves a lot on reorder. So when an operator does something and it's a reorder, hey, you know what, that's all me, I did that last time, blah blah blah. So there's a lot of— you know, really cool that you do that. There's a competitive kind of edge amongst where it's like, oh, you didn't do that? I said, oh yeah, that was me. Like, okay, cool, you know. And then, you know, so it's great.

And they develop a relationship with the product.

Correct.

Because you're already— you're fine with it.

But it's also because I did a good job on this.

Yeah, it came around.

It came around because it's almost like a, like a chef's apprentice that comes up with a new recipe, right, that's added to a menu item in the restaurant, right? And then you see that order coming back and back again, like, oh, they, they love the, you know, the, the shrimp scampi or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, exactly right.

So I thought that was really, really cool. And certainly the— certainly a big operation at Hirsch, but it also felt— had a very, very small family vibe to it as well. And I think that that is certainly consistent with what you just said in terms of that ownership of the repeat orders or what George was like as he was walking through, or again, the pride that you could see in the different folks that were making them, making making the products. And I think for me, I'll never lose— and I don't think you'll ever lose this as well, given that we were both on the distributor side in the early days— I'll never lose that affinity to product and that relationship to product. Yeah. And it's such a great reminder to know how the stuff is made. And there's, you know, there's a lot of great examples out there of where people really take genuine pride in what they're doing. And then to see that full cycle, like, we, we see when we sell to our customers or sold to our customers that same bottle, and we see them beam with pride when they get it as an anniversary gift, and they're continuing to use it time and time again. That full-cycle experience, you can't beat that in any other form of advertising. Yeah, to be clear, I'm also aware when it falls short, when the imprint sucks, the person who's decorating it doesn't care, the salesperson is just doing a transactional order to end a client who is lazily handing out the product at a trade show booth that gets thrown in the trash or left in the hotel room, that's the brand fill discussion that we've been talking about, right? So it's, it's obviously terrible when it doesn't hit, but when it does hit and all those parts are aligned, it's absolutely magical.

Yeah, it's that attention to quality, something of which Hirsch really focuses on.

So you have pretty much our setup for different layers of different artworks. We modify them according to however we see fit, however they're going to print out, and it helps us optimize the quality of the print, you know. So we're looking for TM registration marks, SMs, or whatever in the ends, um, curves, distortions, you name it, we can fix it.

You notice he's well, very well trained, and everybody is here about quality. We're all about quality. We're not going to just rush out 100 pieces if we feel like it's not perfect. We're going to— we'd much rather stop, do get it right and then redo it before we ship it out our door. So I think that's where we're a little different to like some of the other suppliers where it's more just volume, you know, you got those 350-piece, $350 orders where it's just get them out of the door. We're just a different type of company. We really want to focus more on quality, making sure that the end user is going to be happy with the finished result.

Right.

Mark, speaking of family, we met two people on the floor, and this is that moment you have when you're on a factory floor and you're talking with someone, you realize there's an incredible culture and energy happening on the factory floor that's completely escaped your notice as a distributor. We met two people, Gloria.

I'll put in the machine, make sure that machine's pumping. Whatever comes in, shoot it back out. And we have other managers. Gloria would be one of us. Gloria.

Gloria.

Hi.

We call her Choco, a term of endearment. Choco Bear. Uh, she started with us, man, 2013, 2012, 2012, 2011.

2011.

Wow.

So like a year and a half after us.

Awesome. She's always had a smile every single day. She does, you know, she comes to work always with a smile, which we love to see.

She's very shy, so we like to bother her with that. She's very shy, but she does help us out a lot.

Who was delightful and charming and amazing. And it felt like every time we turned around, there was another family member to meet. And family member used in terms of just the term of fellow employee, but Then at one moment, I don't know if you recall this, we meet Sandra, Jorge's wife.

This is Sandra, guys. This is the scheduling manager and also my wife.

All right. I see her every day.

Yeah, exactly right. Did you meet here? Yeah, we met here.

You met here?

Awesome.

That's really how he gets orders pushed early. Yeah, right. I need this, I need this out. Help a brother out. Yeah, but she's actually She started with us in 2013, right? Yeah, 2013. She says all this JBL with us. Well, there you go. So we actually, we met here. I don't know how, but we started talking to each other and next thing you know, we're actually married. We have two kids. So it's pretty great.

That was a very sweet exchange. He was gregarious and outgoing. And Sandra was lovely and sweet and a bit shy and embarrassed when she came out there, but she was very happy to see us and to say hello. But you could tell where the power dynamic rested in that situation. And it was certainly with her. And it was just, it was a really cool moment. Yeah, it was a really cool moment.

Lastly, I want to say this. The thing I think— the reason we wanted to publish this episode was to talk about the people behind the merch, the people making the merch for us and working so hard. There are thousands of people in this industry, thousands in this industry who are in factories, who are handling distribution through our parcel carriers and UPS and FedEx. There are so many people that make the magic happen beyond just the distributor and supplier sales relationship. There are just so much. And it's the complexity of this industry and the thousands of people that make it work that sort of made us sort of pause and go, let's celebrate this, this week and just say thank you to everyone who is in this industry who works so hard, who leads teams like this on the factory floor at Hirsch and Gemline and PC&A and all these companies that have these amazing teams. But the thing I want to leave us with, that there was a moment where Jorge was talking about how they would come in on Saturdays or do whatever it takes to actually meet the demand. And this is coming into the fall season and the holiday season. So right now it's crazy. They move from 20, 30, 50 employees up to 80 or more. But that struck me as we need to be careful not to take for granted what these folks do to make a simple order happen on our behalf.

We got so much volume that we had to get a second one. So Right now, we're— luckily for us, we're ahead of schedule. We have been coming on Saturday, just kind of anticipating November coming through and Thanksgiving and all that good stuff. Yeah. So we try to anticipate the hit as much as we can. So we're ahead of schedule.

Bobby, I'm glad that we're doing this episode, and I'm really glad that we captured this audio right from the floor that I think showcased that pride, that pride in what folks are doing on the production floor. I think it also showcases a lot of the genuine curiosity that you had from us, from Dave, from you, from me. We've all been in the industry for some time and we're separated from this reality a lot of the time, right? We're either selling or we're building software or we're doing our day-to-day with content. And it's such a fabulous reminder that you get out into the field and you see where the products are actually being made and produced. And you can see the good, you can see the bad, you can see the things that are frustrating. I mean, just like we see the good and the bad when you go into a distributor's office, right? It's not all wonderful. And I think that the fact having that exposure is such a great reminder of where things come from in this space. And I think it creates— I've always said that the distributors who are the most informed and the most educated are the very best salespeople in our industry. They're the ones that can connect what's happening on the factory floor right to the advertisers' and end users' hands. Yeah. And, and those are the very best salespeople. And that's why it's so important to make that investment in, in going to the factory floors and, and understanding what happens at the supplier partners. I think that's what we're trying to do with this particular series is we wanted to take what we learned and we wanted to be able to, to put this into everyone's ears and, and hopefully inspire them to, you know, go on similar journeys like we did.

As we wrap here, I think it's really important we pause and say thank you to the thousands of people who make this industry work beyond just the sales personalities that do also make it work really hard and, and really well. I remember one leader in the industry coming from retail into our space said that she was amazed at how well this industry actually worked. And when you're in the middle of supply chain, you're in the middle of all those challenges, it's hard to see that. But it is such a complex business and it does work. And it works because of people like Jorge and their craft and their attention to craft and craftsmanship. So to the Hearst team, Peter, Paul, Brittany, Josh, Amanda, thank you for inviting us into your business home. Jorge, thank you for introducing us to your pride and joy there in the factory and the amazing work that you do. There. By the way, this episode was not sponsored in any way. It's just we fanboyed out over the tour and over the process and just the fact that he was such a delightful representation of this industry on a level that we don't think about often enough.

Yeah. And we hope to do more of these types of episodes because I think it's really important to be able to share and expose some of these stories. Yeah.

Thank you very much, Georgie.

George, thank you.

This is awesome.

Very nice.

Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you so much.

Thank you for coming, guys.

Really appreciate it.

Really appreciate it. If you guys don't treat you right, let me know and I'll put a complaint.

Okay, either one. Either one. Hey, wait, George, can we get a picture with you? Sure.

How about that? If it's not like that, I'll be furious. You may get through. Here, Dave, come on.

Yeah, y'all get in there. You'll get in there. Sorry, guys. All right, thanks, George.

He's like a celebrity.

He is awesome.

What a good guy.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SKUcast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SKUcast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.