I Must Say That I Am Pretty Psyched For This Week

In my March 28th blog post, I talked all about my next big trip to North and South Carolina. This is the big week of the trip and I am psyched. What I am most psyched about is going to Oxford Cutting & Shipping and here’s why.

If you recall, Oxford Cutting & Shipping is the facility we acquired in order to have somewhere to have our precuts produced. Formerly, this was owned by another gentleman, but he retired so we really had no choice, but to acquire the business to not disrupt our business. So far so good over there. It’s also opening up a lot of new opportunities which is always a good thing.

I now want to get into a little more depth about Oxford Cutting & Shipping (OCS). You might be wondering why we named it Oxford Cutting and Shipping. The prior business was called Mid-state. We didn’t want to keep that name so my brother and I thought it over and came up with Oxford. For all my avid followers, you may recall that Jaftex once had a print mill in the US called Oxford Printing and Shipping in Oxford, North Carolina. Hence the name. Now you know my little secret.

I am really very excited for my fans and followers on my blog (www.scottfortunoff.com), Facebook (@jaftexpresident), Instagram (scott_fortunoff), YouTube (scottfortunoff) and Tik Tok (@fabricfriday). The reason I am excited for all of you is that my videographer is coming with me on the trip and we are going to get tons of great footage of precuts being made and other cool things. As you know, I am a big fan of sharing the behind-the-scenes with my followers because I know you guys love this stuff. And that is why we will be coming home with the motherload of eye candy for you all.

At OCS, they do a lot of different things that I hope to be able to share with you depending on what is going on at the warehouse during my visit. They make a variety of precuts including, 5×5 charms, 10×10 charms, 2.5 inch strips, fat quarters, design rolls, special cuts, flat folds and kits too. As you might have heard me say recently, since we now have this new cutting facility, we are ramping up our precut production and offerings amongst the companies.

As we speak, we are in the process of introducing basic precuts for The Blank Quilting Corp, Studio E Fabrics and Henry Glass Fabrics. What we are doing is making more precuts using our basics because we stock these lines year in and year out, so we might as well offer them in precuts too. Keep your eye out for these as they will be arriving at your local quilt shops later this year.

As you know, FreeSpirit has a very robust precut program and they continue to go strong with their precut business as they have done for a very long time. Also, our Fabric Editions division has all of its fabrics distributed from this facility too. In this case, for Fabric Editions, the warehouse is used as a pick and pack. This is where we have the team fulfill all of our reorder business that Fabric Editions does with the big-box chains. In reality, buying the facility was most important for these two businesses and they are the real reason why we had to acquire OCS. Now we are trying to broaden our offerings in an effort to keep a constant flow of business at this new facility.

So there you go with my little blog for the week. I hope you stay on the lookout for all my behind-the-scenes videos.

Happy May!