The workers at Tiffany & Co.’s Rhode Island facilities had a betting pool when they first moved from their 5,000-square-foot Warwick location to a jewelry manufacturing facility 20 times the size in Cumberland.
With most of the workers guessing in the 20s or 30s, they tried to determine how many applicants would respond to a help-wanted ad in the newspaper. Group Director Charles E. Seipold said they were all pleasantly surprised when 180 people showed up, and Human Resources Manager Karen Stromborn won the pool by guessing 100.
Pleasant surprise has been a common sentiment for the past nine months at the Cumberland plant, which is called the Forest Hill Facility.
John Orrico, vice president of manufacturing, said the number of people on staff at Forest Hill grows almost daily.
“From a manufacturing point of view we’re doing great,” he said. “We’re adding to our staff and we’ve gotten great support from the greater Providence community.
“All of the things that we actually came to the area for are paying off,” he said. “Within this state there’s really an established infrastructure in place to help the support of our manufacturing facilities.”
Tiffany, which is based in New York, has 250 employees at the Cumberland facility, and Orrico said the company plans on adding to the staff throughout the year to achieve the plant projections.
“Most of the labor is directly from the greater Providence area,” he said. “They come from as far way as Middletown, Coventry, and some are even from Attleboro and Wrentham.”
Worldwide the publicly held company has 5,000 employees. Tiffany is an internationally renowned retailer, designer, manufacturer and distributor. The company’s merchandise offerings include selections of fine jewelry (78% of fiscal 2000 sales), timepieces, sterling silverware, china, crystal, stationery, fragrances and accessories.
The company has seen a decline in sales recently, as consumers bought fewer diamond rings and bracelets, and earnings this quarter will be less than analysts’ estimates. The year ended Jan. 31, 2002, net sales of $1,606,535,000 were 4 percent lower than $1,668,056,000 in the prior year. The company recently announced a 2.3 percent decline in fiscal fourth-quarter profit.
But, the work is going strong at the Rhode Island plant.
Structured as a replica of Tiffany & Co.’s original building in the Forest Hill area of Newark, N.J., the plant itself sits atop a hill on 22 acres at the end of a long driveway in Highland Corporate Park. The facility opened last May, infusing some much-needed life into the state’s ailing jewelry industry.
In the cafeteria of Forest Hill, the workers eat lunch the way they arrive and leave work, in staggered shifts.
“The cafeteria here is as big as the entire Warwick facility was,” said Seipold.
The staggered shifts for arrival and departure are part of Tiffany’s strict security policy. No workers are allowed to even wear jewelry into work in the morning, lest they pass off stolen jewelry as their own. And upon departing for the day, they all walk through metal detectors without their shoes on, and are searched with a wand. Seipold said there have not been any problems with people trying to steal from the company, but after all, the company does manufacture precious metals.
All types of jewelry are produced at Forest Hill, including necklaces, rings, bracelets, earrings, and key chains. Most units are silver, but some gold is turned around there. Seipold said he predicts over 2 million units will move through the facility this year.
Orrico said the estimation of products moved reflects in Forest Hill’s hiring.
“Things are moving almost exactly as scheduled,” he said. “Our products families are performing very well for us at retail. What we do is get a really good understanding of the demand and then put together a resource plan to meet that demand.”
