About Office Depot

Yesterday I received a comment from miss Storm on one of my reports. She asked about the things Office Depot does. I now have half an hour of spare time until lunch so I thought I'd expand on that a little bit. I'll just tell what has become clear to me so far.

Office Depot is an American company that sells products for in the office. You can think pens, stickynotes, notebooks, penholders, but also furniture for in your office. The headquarter is situated in Florida and the headquarter of the European department is in Venlo. The products aren't all produced over here but everywhere in the world. This is because Office depot sells various brands. They sell for 'Viking' and they have their own brand. Their own brand also consists of various different brands but they are just labelled with Office Depot. For example, I was told that in a factory they make a 1000 packs of stickynotes and label them 'post-it'. A minute after that, they produce another 1000 packs of stickynotes, which are exactly the same, but then labeled 'Office Depot'. This means that the quality is just as good as any other A-Brand, but just a little cheaper. This is not always the case, Office depot also owns certain 'exclusive brands'. This means that they are the only company that sells these products from that particular brand. Brands like these are: Foray, NiceDay, Ativa, etc.
NiceDay is one of the more regular pens, one that a student would also use. While Foray is a more fancy pen and also a bit more expensive because of that.
These products are made by the brands themselves. Or at least, by their factories. They could be situated in Europe, but there are also many of them in China. Office Depot takes care of these factories and tries to make sure that all working conditions are good there. Today someone told me the following story:

'Last year, we were visiting one of the factories in China. When walking around there, we suddenly noticed a very young looking girl. They asked for her ID, but it became clear that all ID's were kept together in one locker. They immediately shut down all production, because the factory owner is not allowed to keep all these people's ID's. They are not slaves and must be able to keep their own ID. When the ID of the young girl was found, it turned out that she was only 14 years old. Which means she is not allowed to do work like that. But we couldn't just fire her and send her away because might just be so that she is the one that has to provide money for her family. So when things like that happen, we of course have to fire her but we also make sure that the family is properly supported by Office Depot.'

I found it really nice to hear that they really try to make everything right for their employees.
When all these products are finally made, they go to the Office Depot warehouses and they stay there until sold or shipped to stores. In the Netherlands, there is a warehouse in Zwolle. There are no shops here. But there are many in the rest of the world, for example also in Brussels, so not that far away.

In Venlo there are various departments that eventually all have to make sure that their products get sold. eCommerce takes care of the online shops, NMS is there to find new partners and to maintain the existing ones, Daymon is there to promote the Own Brand, merchandising is there to choose which products they have to sell: what does the customer want, Finance takes care of all the financial business, IT has to make sure all the computers and their programs work, etc. In that way each department has its own job. The building here is really big and complex because there are so many different departments. I got a chance to see a bit of every department, which is really nice because then you get an idea what kind of work there is behind a few office products.

I hope this makes a bit more clear :)
An update on today will follow tonight, right now is lunch time!