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Limited Brands offerings are better still with Accel packaging
“Limited Brands was my first client and I am proud to say they are still a client today,” says Accel’s CEO. “I am blessed to have such a relationship.”
 'We are a retail business, so agility and timeliness in our suppliers are essential,” declares Stacie Bailey, strategic procurement manager for Limited Brands (Columbus, OH).
Limited Brands is the upscale company that was named the world’s most admired specialty retailer by Fortune magazine a few years ago. Its brands are sold in its nearly 3,000 specialty stores nationwide, through the glam Victoria’s Secret and other catalogs, and under the La Senza name in Canada and forty other countries. Its stores include Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body Works, Henri Bendel, La Senza, C.O. Bigelow and White Barn Candle, and its sales last year reached $10 billion.
Evolving supplier diversity
The supplier diversity program at Limited Brands started to take shape at the beginning of 2003, explains supplier diversity manager Abigail W. Kofete. “It’s part of our overall enterprise and inclusion policy, and its prime goal is to give minority-
and women-owned businesses equal access and opportunity
to compete with all other businesses in Limited Brands’ procurement process.
“We feel it’s a way of making sure we have a fresh perspective and innovative solutions for our business, and of encouraging economic vitality and prosperity in the communities we serve.”
The company began by assembling a team to research and benchmark other supplier diversity programs, and went on to “develop our own strategy that would fit best at Limited Brands.”
 At the same time the sponsors began to educate the company’s many procurement and sourcing groups. “We explained what supplier diversity is and how the program will be implemented at Limited Brands,” Kofete says.
Today Limited Brands has a useful website (www.limitedbrands.com/supplier_diversity) complete
with lists of categories and items it might want to buy, and a registration database where “We walk prospective suppliers through the steps of the registration process,” Kofete notes.
Working with the councils
Limited Brands works closely with the South Central Ohio
Minority Business Council, an affiliate of the National Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC), as well as with the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) and its regional affiliate. The company has a representative on the board at South Central, and, in fact, Kofete was employed there until her recent move to Limited Brands.
NMSDC and WBENC played important roles in the development of Limited Brands’ supplier diversity program, Kofete points out; the two councils continue to provide guidance and training. NMSDC and WBENC both sponsor trade fairs that the company continues to find helpful in identifying likely diverse suppliers.
Mentor to three suppliers
Limited Brands recently became part of NMSDC’s “centers of excellence” corporate benchmarking and minority supplier development program. “We’re currently working with three minority suppliers,” Bailey notes. One of the mentees is involved in IT staffing, one in logistics and the third in promotional products.
The idea, says Bailey, is that “We can show them how to grow, and work with them on other skills. They can also learn from other corporations participating in the program.”
“I definitely think our supplier diversity program and training has had a very positive effect on our whole company, and particularly on our supply chain team,” says Bailey.
Meet Accel Inc, a “big player”
Accel Inc (Columbus, OH), a contract packaging firm, is a WBE founded by Tara Abraham and her husband David.
“We use them for packaging many of our brands,” Bailey says. “They are a big player; we definitely look at them as one of our large diverse suppliers.”
An important plus for the company is its co-founder and co-owner Tara Abraham. “Tara has had a long-term relationship with our company,” Bailey notes. “She understands the culture and needs of our company, and has provided some really innovative solutions to package design that have helped us from the standpoint of attractive presentation and cost efficiency.”
End-to-end innovation
Tara Abraham strongly agrees with this assessment. “Accel Inc is essentially a contract packaging company but by no means just a co-packer,” she declares. “Our value is in vertical integration.
“We specialize in the complete supply chain and offer our clients an end-to-end innovative packaging solution. We design for manufacturability, to streamline costs and to bring products to market fast and flawlessly.”
Accel provides all the packaging services: hand and/or automated assembly, shrink wrapping, packaging engineering and design, manufacturing of thermoforms, prototyping, sequential kitting, sourcing, new product creation, and other services as they become available.
A growing company
Accel was founded in 1995. It began in a 1,200 sq foot facility: about the footprint of a moderate-sized house. Today the company has two locations in Columbus that total more than 500,000 sq ft, plus joint ventures in Santa Ana, CA; Imuris, Mexico; and three locations in China. “We also,” Abraham notes with pride, “have a fantastic team, because we believe strongly in human capital!”
Her company’s work for Limited Brands “has had a tremendous impact on our growth,” Abraham declares. “We are always looking for innovative ways of engineering our lines and designing production-friendly packaging, and this partnership with Limited Brands has increased our business exponentially.
“We work hand-in-hand with Limited Brands to assist in making their visions a reality. Whether it’s buying or engineering a new piece of equipment or adding new services to increase our supply chain offerings to them, it’s all about partnering and succeeding together.
“In fact,” she adds with a smile, “this is really a continuing mentorship from their point of view!”
Into other industries
Its work for Limited Brands has established Accel as a market leader in the contract packaging industry. “As a result, we’ve been able to attract other clients and expand into other industries,” Abraham notes. The company assembles sample over-the-counter product packaging for dermatologists’ offices, sources and assembles medical and first-aid kits and engineers solutions for packaging challenges in the automotive industry. “We also source, design and assemble high-end food baskets, and make up pallet-mounted displays for club stores.
“We are choosy who we do business with,” Abraham warns. “We will only partner with companies that want long-term relationships.” That’s because it’s Accel’s policy “to become fully integrated into our clients’ scope of business.
“By working from product concept to completion, we’re able to reduce costs for our clients and bring their products to market faster with visually stimulating presentation.” Accel’s forward-looking packaging ideas, Abraham notes, can amount to reductions in landfill waste, significant cost savings and even labor saving at the store level.
Tara Abraham: techie by adoption
Accel’s dynamic leader isn’t literally a techie, but she certainly employs many of them. The Columbus facility includes forty-five production lines, twenty-four shipping docks, and a state-of-the-art warehouse management system, along with technologically advanced thermoforming and prototyping capabilities.
Before launching her own company, Abraham was a product development manager at Bath & Body Works, one of the Limited Brands group of companies. She became savvy in spreadsheets and other IT work, and “I apply that learning experience to Accel every day,” she says.
“We are constantly updating the technology of our systems and equipment to maximize our productivity. We have an internal IT department and also use outside consultants; we are constantly researching the next best thing in technology for our business.”
“I could do it better”
As a corporate associate at Bath & Body Works, Abraham sometimes outsourced promotions to local contract packaging companies and was often disappointed in the results. “Even though I did site visits and wrote quality and spec sheets, the result was not always up to my standards,” she says.
“One day, while standing on a skid of packages in the distribution center in my suit and high heels, it hit me that there was a need for a high-quality contract packaging company in Columbus.”
After thinking it over she approached Bath & Body’s VP of manufacturing and proposed her idea to start her own business in contract packaging. “I explained that Limited Brands would be gaining a supplier who understood not only quality standards, on-time delivery and confidentiality, but even the company’s internal operations. And since I came from Limited Brands myself I would be fiercely loyal and dedicated to the continued success of its brands.
“Limited Brands was my first client and I am proud to say they are still a client today. I consider them a lifelong partner and feel as though I still work there. I am blessed to have such a fantastic relationship.”
Endless mentoring
Looking back at Accel’s thirteen years with Limited Brands, Abraham recalls “countless times when they’ve mentored us.
“They were often the number one reason why we ventured into new services. They asked us to shrink wrap, then to direct ship, then to do packaging engineering as well as sourcing. The list goes on and on; they have been a wonderful mentor!”
The point, she explains, is that “Limited Brands believes in investing in its suppliers by giving them the information necessary to succeed. With our upstream knowledge of what the company wants to achieve, Accel can plan and execute to support the vision. The more information shared, the stronger the team and the higher the probability of success!”
Limited Brands “is a company that walks the walk and talks the talk. It is committed to growing M/WBEs, and certainly it is always looking at new opportunities and offering connections to grow Accel.
“I appreciate their commitment to supplier diversity and inclusion,” says Abraham.
D/C
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