Arcade Marketing Success: It was in the Cards

By Carolyn Mitchell

More than a century ago the founders of Arcade Printing set aside 45 minutes each mid-day for a friendly game of setback. As they played their hands, the foursome had no idea what was in the cards for their fledgling business which would someday count the giants of the cosmetics industry among its clients.

Nor could they have foreseen that the direct descendant of their enterprise would occupy a facility just a few miles from Arcade’s original Broad Street location.

Visant Corp., owner of Arcade Marketing, recently announced plans to consolidate the Chattanooga plant with Arcade’s Baltimore operations.

The $10 million project will retain some 210 jobs in Chattanooga, add 50 more over the next three years and include the purchase of the Custom Baking plant at 3800 Amnicola Highway for the new operation.

Arcade’s primary claim to fame, the ScentStrip, or fragrance in a fold, is now produced at a sister plant in Dixon, IL, according to Bill Hoffman, vice president and general manager of Arcade’s Chattanooga facility.

But the local plant continues to manufacture labels containing sample cosmetics as well as fragrances. “The labels can be attached to a carrier but they are also the vehicle that delivers the sample,” Hoffman says. “You may see the product bound into a magazine or mailer or hand-out piece. You can peel open the label and experience the product as a single use application.”

Hoffman says the Chattanooga facility is adding manufacturing processes that were housed in Baltimore exclusively. “The cosmetic sampling products will now be produced in Chattanooga, so the consolidation will introduce new equipment, technology and job skills into the local market,” he says.

Both the Baltimore and Chattanooga operations include laboratory functions where new products and processes are tested and developed, according to Hoffman. “The laboratory functions will also be consolidated here as part of the project,” he says.

A printing shop for four decades, Arcade was relocated to East Main Street by Gaines Campbell Jr. after his father acquired the business in 1946. Over the years Arcade grew from a small-job print shop to one of the nation’s largest specialty printers.

In 1979, Arcade revolutionized the world of fragrance marketing with the introduction of the ScentStrip brand fragrance sampling process. At the time National Cash Register (NCR) produced a microencapsulated (minute drops of a substance encased in a capsule) ‘scratch and sniff ’ SAFE-T-SNIF that smelled like leaking gas once it was scratched. Arcade put the SAFE-T-SNIFS on paper, printed them and sold the ads to gas companies for distribution to their customers.

One day Campbell pulled some of the SAFE-T-SNIF sheets apart and smelled the gas odor strongly. “Knowing that the perfume companies were not very fond of ‘scratch and sniff,’ I thought to myself, ‘If this were Chanel No. 5, we could market it and sell it,’” he told the News Free Press in 1992.

Campbell and his brother, Jimmy, bought the microencapsulation rights and technology from NCR and began developing ScentStrip.

In 2002, when the company celebrated its 100th anniversary, Arcade employed some 375 people. The company had headquarters in New York close to many of its famed customers, among them Calvin Klein, Yves Saint Laurent and Ralph Lauren. It boasted facilities in Paris and salespeople in London, Tokyo and Toronto.

By that time Arcade was producing 1.6 billion magazine inserts a year, in addition to 500 million cosmetics labels. The company enjoyed sales of about $130 million and status as the world’s leader in sampling products for the cosmetics and fragrance industries.

In 2008 Visant, which acquired the company in 2004, consolidated the Chattanooga fragrance insert manufacturing operation into the facility in Illinois. The move cost the Chattanooga Arcade operation 150 jobs, leaving just over 200 employees to focus on making labels.

With this summer’s announcement from Visant, the local Arcade plant appears poised for a come-back in the global Arcade Marketing operation which is the world’s leading supplier of sampling technologies to multiple industries and has sales offices and related facilities on five continents.

The Amnicola Highway project would no doubt please Arcade’s founders: Arch Faidley, Charles Douglass, Sam Behm and Dan Carruth. The friends, all employees of MacGowan-Cooke Printing, decided in 1902 to form their own business. They established their shop where the Arcade, a walkway from Market to Broad Street, met Broad.

The founders resisted selecting a “boss” but decided they should have officers and Faidley became president, according to The Chattanooga Times in 1969. “They agreed that they would always keep enough money on hand to meet the firm’s bills, and that every bill would be met when due,” The Times reported.

“There was another unwritten rule by which they stuck, and which probably had an effect upon the health and longevity of them all: They would stop work each day at noon and eat lunch, then at 12:15 the four gathered around a table and played setback until 1. ‘It lets us all forget our troubles for 45 minutes,’

Faidley explained, and they all stated that the game never led to arguments serious enough to cause a quarrel.’’