The Marena Group

Congratulations to The Marena Group Inc. - 2006 Grand All-Star Award Winner    
When you enter The Marena Group’s headquarters, it takes a little while to realize you are in a very different sort of corporation.

At first glance, the firm’s Lawrenceville, GA, operation looks much like many of the other modern facilities situated in the newer office parks of the Greater Atlanta area’s burgeoning suburbs — lots of windows, a sparkling foyer, a stately conference table and a view to neat rows of cubicles nearby.

But before long, the subtle and not-so-subtle things that make Marena one-of-a-kind begin to show themselves.
You discover that one of the company’s founders, COO William BC “Bill” Watkins, works from a cubicle situated right amid those of Marena’s other key managers. The firm’s customer service leaders are just across from him; the chief technology officer a few arms’ lengths away. There is little barrier between them as their cubicle “walls” are of the low-slung variety.

To consult with the director of operations John Rogelstad, Watkins can merely exit this “office” area through a door that opens immediately to the firm’s factory floor, where Rogelstad’s standup desk is located amid the company’s manufacturing force.

The wall separating the office space from the production area consists of a bank of large windows that offer full visibility between those running the machinery that keeps Marena going and those manning the phones, systems, service and sales networks that feed the business. Sewing operator, manager and founder have an equal vantage point of each other’s daily routine.

While everyone is going about his or her business, it’s not unusual to hear a loud elephant-like cry echo through the building. That would be a signal to all that a consumer somewhere in the world is requesting a real-time chat with Marena through its new online customer service center. One of the managers scrambles to his or her computer and dons a headset to handle this high-priority inquiry.

What is The Marena Group?
Suffice it to say this firm is not one you would define as your typical apparel business. Yes, it does manufacture apparel, but just what is Marena all about?

The company, which was started about 10 years ago, produces compression garments. Its ComfortWear® brand of garments includes everything from bras and girdles to facial wear, vests and post-surgical exercise wear. There are some 4,000 SKUs in all, and Marena manufactures and ships approximately 250,000 units annually under the one roof of its Lawrenceville facility.

Its products are designed to be worn after a surgical procedure, such as plastic aesthetic surgery (a breast augmentation or liposuction procedure, for example) and plastic reconstructive surgery (such as breast augmentation after a mastectomy or an abdominal tummy tuck).
Its garments are made of a proprietary fabric called Comfortweave® that acts like a second skin over the wearer’s healing body. This moisture-wicking, anti-microbial fabric is designed to help minimize the post-operative patient’s bruising and swelling while at the same time enhancing the comfort of the wearer. Patient comfort is the No. 1 issue physicians and nurses face when dealing with compression products each day, says Watkins, and Marena brought them a well-received solution that has markedly improved patient compliance.

ComfortWear garments are designed to allow freedom of movement while providing enough compression to help flush potentially harmful fluid accumulation using the body’s natural processes in the lymph system.

It took many years of partnership between Marena, universities and textile manufacturers to develop Marena’s Comfortweave because of the material’s design and manufacturing complexity. Comfortweave performs significantly better than standard elastic fabrics, according to documented studies by scientific textile laboratories at the Georgia Institute of Technology, North Carolina State University and Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. The sixth generation of Comfortweave now on the market is manufactured for Marena by Elastic Fabrics of America (EFA) and is “F5-certified,” a new standard in technical compression fabrics.

The business model
Marena’s business model is to sell through medical supplies distributors. It has relationships with distributors in approximately 50 countries around the world, through which it reaches approximately 7,500 different customers, which are usually doctors’ offices, surgery clinics and hospitals. These offices, in turn, usually supply the goods to the end consumer, although Marena also may ship garments directly to the consumer, particularly for its North American distribution.

In a typical scenario in the U.S. market, for example, a nurse in a doctor’s office measures the patient before an operation, places an order for a compression garment through a distributor and then receives the shipment directly from Marena. It is not unusual for the nurse to dress the patient in the garment in the operating room because the patient is still asleep after his or her surgery, or is not yet physically able to dress independently.

Doctors may prescribe compression garments for patients, with instructions for a support bra or compression girdle, for instance, to be worn 24 hours a day throughout the patient’s six- to eight-week recovery period, including in the shower and to bed. “Wearing a garment like this day in and day out makes the comfort such an important factor,” says Watkins.

Marena competes in this space with approximately 200 others globally, and Watkins is quick to say that there is no one key to his company’s success but rather a “soup pot” of capabilities that distinguish it from the rest. The company keeps a very open-door policy, and has granted tours of its operations to customers as well as competitors who have been part of visiting groups.

What is it about Marena that competitors find so hard to duplicate? Beyond its Comfortweave fabric innovation, which is a huge part of its success, says Watkins, the company is very, very fast. He points out that Marena offers same-day shipping on all orders regardless of style, color or size. It takes orders until 6 p.m., and one-third of its production work force is scheduled to work until 7 p.m. to ensure it can produce and ship the garments that same day. Many orders arrive at the customer’s location the next day by 8 a.m.

Significantly, Marena is not able to deliver so quickly because of a mammoth warehouse supply of goods. What little “emergency” inventory Marena stocks is kept in a small corner of the factory near the loading dock and overnight shipping station. “When people hear about our order-late/same-day shipping service, they always think we must have a couple of big DCs in New Jersey or somewhere, and they have a hard time believing it all comes out of here,” says Rogelstad. “We cut it, sew it and ship it … kind of straight from the sewing station to the FedEx truck to the customer.”

About 80 percent of the company’s sales are related to about 20 percent of its overall SKUs — its most popular size and style configurations. The remaining 20 percent of orders represents unique, one-off orders of garments required in special sizes or in unusual configurations.
The company operates on a pure demand-driven model and is managed by an intricate IT platform that automates workflow. Marena does not do forecasts or schedule production as most manufacturers do, but rather flows work through its facility in a priority-driven manner. Put another way, Marena does not measure its success according to its level of on-time shipments but instead by its level of speed in getting shipments out the door. As Rogelstad says: “We ship 100 percent on time, so our metric is, ‘How fast do we ship?’ ”

The underlying philosophy
In many ways, The Marena Group is a humble revolutionary. Watkins worked for years in big-corporate America before starting up Marena with his wife, Vera. By building their dream, they thought they could develop a company founded and operated on key core values and principles — including a life that permitted more time with their family — many of which are related to their Christian beliefs.

Bill Watkins is very conscious that his firm is the exception to the rule with its U.S. manufacturing model. He says it is a great source of inspiration and determination for him and the rest of the Marena team to succeed simply because it is one of the relative few remaining 100 percent U.S. apparel manufacturing operations.

“It’s a crime that we’re outsourcing our manufacturing know-how,” he says. “The United States doesn’t need to be only receiving other countries’ products while our people are only able to find work in service industries.”

He says he is adamant that Marena, while still “as small as a flea” in relation to most apparel manufacturers and in its “toddler years,” will continue to walk its talk and work to prove to the world that U.S. manufacturing can be a very viable strategy in some interesting business models. “We are tiny, but we can yell loud,” he says. “People say the only thing small about us today is our size.”