One-On-One With Valpak's David Fox

It's interesting to note that prior to 2002, the primary growth engine for our company was sending out more envelopes. Rather than 10 times a year, the goal would be 12 times a year, which our production processes handled quite well. However, since the early 2000s, our growth engine for the company shifted to more of a let's put more pieces in the envelopes that we do send out. That allowed us to take advantage of 'free space' in the envelope without significantly increasing (postal) costs. The problem was the manufacturing processes we were using began to break down as we pushed 40 to 50 pieces in the envelope. It didn't work and we became more and more inefficient as we added more pieces to the envelope. A big driver for the new plant was determining how to add more pieces to the envelope without growing costs (adding a huge head count) significantly.