Case Study: Premier Yarns' Pick-Pack-Ship Solution

Knitting, quilting and other crafts experienced a revival during the Covid-19 pandemic with companies like Premier® Yarns in Harrisburg, North Carolina, seeing a spike in sales as those quarantined at home turned to a mid-19th century pastime to pass the time. 

A leading North American manufacturer and distributor of hand knitting yarns, Premier opened as a mass market distributor in 2005, selling its colorful skeins to retail chains like Walmart, Hobby Lobby, JoAnn’s and Michael’s, with a sister company, Universal Yarns, selling to smaller, independent retailers.

The company launched a website in 2008 and, in 2010, established an e-commerce platform for online sales to end users. Before the pandemic, sales online had slowly increased from an average of five orders per day to about 20. But when Covid forced retailers such as JoAnn’s and Michael’s to close, Premier’s online orders immediately jumped to 400–500 per day.

“In 2022, on Black Friday, we got slammed with orders on our dot.com business,” said Premier Yarns President Hal Ozbelli. “FedEx was coming three times each day for pickup, and we regularly ran out of supplies like boxes and tape.”

As orders continued to pour in, Premier owners knew they needed an alternative to their largely manual process.

“We needed to pick fast and accurately,” said Premier Managing Director Yonca Ozbelli. “We considered outsourcing to a third-party logistics company, but quality control is a main issue for us.”

Instead, Premier turned to long-time material handling partner, Carolina Handling.

"After we visited a few of the companies that are currently using these systems, it was a no-brainer. We have found the right partner and team to work with,” Hal Ozbelli said.

Premier’s primary goal was finding a solution that would improve the speed and accuracy of its pick, pack and ship operations. With online orders continuing to grow post Covid, fulfillment rates of 10 or more business days needed to be reduced to a 2- to 3-day turnaround.

Additionally, the company needed a system that would work within its existing 60,000-square-foot facility and an installation that would not disrupt operations that already were strained.

A final consideration was maintaining sound quality within the facility.

“When we first came in, we noticed that all of their processes were very manual,” said Carolina Handling Systems Engineer Jacob Barrett. “At Premier, you’ve got to pick, pack and ship, and there wasn’t one solution for all of those, so we looked at ways to add both mobile robotics, as well as conveyor and sortation solutions to their current process.”

Taking advantage of underutilized floor space at ground level and high warehouse ceilings, Carolina Handling’s Intralogistics Solutions Group first installed a conveyor to serve as a highway for delivering picked orders from packing stations at the center of the warehouse to shipping stations near the back of the facility..

With the new system, 12 mobile Locus robots deliver picked orders to an induction area where they are placed onto a top conveyor and delivered to packing stations on each side.

Once orders are checked, packed and labeled, corrugated cartons and plastic totes are placed on a bottom conveyor, which elevates them through a motor driven roller (MDR) spiral turn, then moves them vertically across the warehouse via a ceiling-hung conveyor. The conveyor declines to the shipping area where packages are offloaded, metered and sorted by shipping method.

Conveyors are equipped with rollers that are sensor activated when a carton or tote approaches. As products pass, rollers turn off until another package is detected, keeping noise levels low and energy efficiency high.