Mattel: a Model for Offshore Manufacturing and Quality (unless you jump out of a bathtub naked onto a toy horse named "Blaze")

Amidst the flurry of news stories going on right now about product quality and China, the NY Times recently ran an article (free registration maybe required) about the world's biggest toy maker, Mattel, as an exemplary model for offshore manufacturing and product quality.  Hats off to Dan Harris of Chinalawblog for writing up a post about the article.  I sent the blog post and article to Roger Rambeau, a partner at Global Sourcing Specialists, this morning and we chatted about the "old days" when he worked his way up from the production line with Mattel to become a Vice President of manufacturing.  Roger managed and worked with Mattel's manufacturing plants and offices both at home and in several countries, including Mexico, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and others.  Throughout his career, he was responsible for Mattel's quality and manufacturing.  The NY Times article quoted M. Eric Johnson, a management professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, who has visited numerous factories in China, including some of Mattel’s as saying

“Mattel was in China before China was cool, and they learned to do business there in a good way. They understood the importance of protecting their brand, and they invested.”

I chatted with Roger, who first went over to China with Mattel in 1971 (well before China was "cool"), about the article this morning, and he concurred:

Mattel was a leader--out there in front of everyone else.  Their practices stemmed from the core principles of the company and we acted accordingly whether at home or abroad.  We took the initiative to work quite a bit with the US Government's Consumer Product Safety Commission and had a lot to do with the development of ASTM (an international product standards organization).  Well before they brought in S. Prakash Sethi, (cited by the NY Times article as a critic of worker mistreatment and hired by Mattel to independently monitor Mattel's factories and vendors' plants), Mattel hired a guy by the name of Chuck Williams, who was instrumental in developing quality and safety standards in the company and industry.  You've got to remember that this was very early on and manufacturing processes overseas could be very rudimentary.  When we first went over to Taiwan, female workers would come into the plant on their bicycles and take home die cut material to sew at home, and then bring it back as a finished piece. 

Mattel would measure and pretest products against the ASTM standards and then send them to an outside laboratory for testing.  If the product involved flammability issues, we did flammability testing.  Small parts issues--we did drop testing and choke testing.  Mattel was behind putting a material in marbles so that if a kid swallowed a marble, it could be seen in an X-Ray, rather than invisible.

Now, consumers and the media have become wise that a lot of companies sourcing product in China and overseas in general aren't paying nearly enough attention to their operations there.  But, even for industry leaders like Mattel, problems arise.  The NY Times article and Mattel's own executives point out that Mattel hasn't been completely free of their own problems in this respect either.  It's not easy and it's never going to be a perfect process--at home or abroad.   Roger regaled me with a few stories this morning which illustrate that not everything can be accounted for:

Sometimes problems are the result of design oversights.  A few years ago, a child got their tongue stuck in a product in a way that the Mattel design team hadn't even considered possible when they designed the product.  In another instance, a plastic toy horse named "Blaze" that a child could sit on and play was being sold.  The horse was made of two parts--front and back--with a seam in the middle where the saddle was.  One little boy, exuberant about his horse, was taking a bath and jumped out of the bath naked and ran over to his horse and jumped into the saddle.  The force of the boy coming down on the horse caused the seam in the saddle to open, catch his member, and shut tight.

The boy lived, but was not ok, if you know what I mean.  After hearing that story, I wasn't ok for about 5 minutes.   Even an industry leader couldn't see that one coming...

Comments

[Chris]

Does anyone have the link to the NY Times article mentioned in this post?

[chuck carroll]

Roger made me a foreman in 1968 and was my General Foreman & Plant manager for a number of years at Mattel. He's the finest man I ever met or worked for. We were the first to work on the Hot Wheels line.

Chuck Carroll
Guadalajara, Mexico