My First Week at Dave & Adam’s

Hello Dave & Adam’s Card World! This is Dave Buchanan and I am the new content editor for the Card World website and our blog page “Card Land”. Now that I’ve been on the job for a week I thought it would be a good time to introduce myself and tell you about some of things I got to do during my first week here at Dave & Adam’s.

I came to D & A’s from WGR Sportsradio 550-AM, which is the #1 sports talk radio station in Buffalo. I’ve worked there for the past 10 years as a talk show producer, sports update anchor and network producer for the Buffalo Sabres Radio Network.

Since I’ve lived in Buffalo all my life I am, of course, a fan of the Buffalo Sabres and Bills (2-0!). My favorite sport, however, is auto racing (especially NASCAR) which puts me in the minority here at Dave & Adam’s. This will explain any future increases in attention to the racing products on our site.

For my first week of work Adam wanted to make sure I received a well-rounded background on how the company operates. I got to witness exactly what happens from the time when your customer order comes in from the website until heads out the door to be delivered to your home.

The orders come in through our system and are checked and processed. The invoices are then printed out and picked up by the warehouse team to be picked and shipped. I spent a whole day picking orders. All of our boxes and cases of cards in the warehouse are organized and assigned an exact spot so the pickers can find them easily.

The warehouse doesn’t look very big at first but once you walk around you realize there is a lot of product in there. All of the boxes are in one section, then there are pallets of unopened cases and there’s even a whole section of just loose packs.

The pickers take an invoice and then go collect the product needed to fill the order. All the filled orders are then placed on carts and once the cart is full it is wheeled to the shipping department. The shipping department then boxes the order and gets it labeled to be shipped out via UPS or the Postal Service.

The people that work in picking and shipping might be the hardest workers at Dave & Adam’s. They have to stay until all the orders that come in that day are ready to go. Most days they can get it done by 5 or 6 PM but it gets real crazy once the holiday shopping rush begins. I was told that the office staff usually winds up helping to get orders ready as it gets closer to Christmas so that likely won’t be my last time working back there.

One of the other people I got to work with was Alex, who does all of our live box and case breaks that are streamed online (DACW Live). While it’s not a lot of work opening a box of cards, it’s what comes after that takes up a lot of his time. After the break is over, Alex has to sort the cards by team and then get them ready to ship to the people that bought spots in the break. The cards are put into sleeves and top loaders and then into envelopes. The more cards there are in a case the longer this process takes. Usually for our box breaks we only send out the big hit cards (autographs, jersey swatches, limited release cards, etc.) and not the commons. There is a huge stack of boxes in Alex’s office filled with commons that is taller than me (and I’m 6’2”). We give the commons away to kids through our stores.

I also spent a day in our second warehouse which is across the street from the Dave & Adam’s headquarters. Part of the building is actually a storefront for a business that our company also operates. It is called Buffalo Vintage & Industrial and it strictly deals in buying and selling vintage items like books, chairs, tables, shelves, industrial equipment and much more.

The rest of the building is filled with sports apparel that we sell online and in our four local stores in the Buffalo area. I could have easily spent my first paycheck on all the Bills and Sabres gear that was in there.

I think my favorite part of my first week was Friday morning when everybody in the office got together to open up a case of In The Game Between The Pipes hockey cards. I hadn’t opened a box of cards in about 15 years so I enjoyed opening all the packs. My box didn’t yield too many big hit but I managed to pull Mike Vernon and John Vanbiesbrouck jersey cards. Adam pulled a 1 of 1 Chris Osgood gold card. Someone else pulled this really nice Tony Esposito jersey/stick card.

Now I am set up in the marketing office here at Dave & Adam’s and I’ll be contributing to the website on a regular basis. If you have an idea on what you would like to see covered on our blog, please send me an e-mail at [email protected] or follow me on twitter @WGRFastTrack.