BUILT FOR PLAY, VOL. 3: What Does it Mean for Foamnasium® to be a Manufacturer?

For most people, the name “manufacturer” implies some level of creation. Simply put, a manufacturer must design and create a product. Right? Don’t all companies do that to some degree? Well, not exactly.

Think of it this way, when you purchase a product, that retailer has to get the product shipped to you. Usually, that’s with a shipping warehouse, or from an assembler that happens to handle shipping as well. That source, had to have gotten the finished product from somewhere – or in most cases from many places that might be located all across the world.

For you as a customer, that means that there were likely at least four different companies involved in the manufacturing and shipping process for a single product. With Foamnasium, that’s all one company, from retail to shipping, under one roof. When we say we’re a manufacturer, we mean it.

Retail

The Foamnasium Marketing Team handles all-things retail – both online and brick and mortar – all from our manufacturing facility in Indiana. We handle our own website, social media, customer service and more, internally. For our customers, this means when you see us publish something or if you call with a question, you’re hearing from a real, live Foamnasium team member.

Shipping

As it happens, the vast majority of online retailers these days never actually see the product they sell. Just ask the mattress industry. They might sell the product, but they have about as much participation in the process as a gas station has over the beef jerky they sell.

In many, many cases, that includes the actual shipping. In these situations the end customer buys online, and the order goes straight to a shipping warehouse in some other place to fulfill the order to the customer.

At Foamnasium, we take the order that comes into our website, the order is printed in our facility, and once it’s made, boxes, and scanned, it goes onto a FedEx or UPS truck that picks up from our location every day.

Assembly

Sometimes, shipping and assembly happens in the same location. Sometimes not. Regardless, at some point in the manufacturing process someone has to take completed raw materials and put them all together in get them into a box that’s ready to ship.

We do all of that as well. Fabric covers come together with fabricated foam, placed together based on orders, boxed, labeled, and ready to ship.

The only question that remains now is this: where do fabric covers and foam come from?

Fabric Cut & Sew

These days, this is the step that’s almost entirely outsourced overseas. For a product like ours, fabric has to be made, then cut down, and then sewn to fit a piece of foam. For clarity, we don’t actually manufacturer the rolls fabric (we do bring them in domestically though!).

On the second floor of our facility is our wonderful sewing team. This team has roughly 40 people who cut fabric down and sew it to order. Each piece of Foamnasium is hand-cut and hand-sewn, all done with domestic raw materials.

Foam Fabrication

While this step isn’t usually outsourced overseas, it’s hardly ever done by most manufacturers. For example, did you know that foam in residential furniture isn’t fabricated by the furniture manufacturers that sell to furniture retailers? That step is done by companies like Foamcraft, Inc., who, you may know, is Foamnasium.

This is one of the most unique facts about Foamnasium. Foam fabrication is our root. It’s where we came from. So, naturally, all of our foam is cut by our team – in the same building where we cut and sew vinyl, assemble, ship, and handle marketing and customer experience.

A true one-stop-shop.

BUILT FOR PLAY, Vol. 3