Jarden Gains ROI with Xinet

With 17,500 employees and offices worldwide, Jarden Corporation is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of consumer products such as toasters, electric kettles, coffee makers, fans and blenders. Its well-recognized brands include Sunbeam, Mr. Coffee, Oster, Rival, Holmes and Crock Pot.

Jarden chose Xinet^® WebNative^® Suite to manage its huge stable of brand assets, realizing a return on their investment in its first year with Xinet’s digital asset management system.

“We chose Xinet because we wanted to utilize WebNative Portal to customize the look and feel of each brand’s website, and because of the amount of people accessing the sites,” said Brad Straka, director of Creative Services at Jarden Consumer Solutions, which is owned by the Jarden Corporation.

“When users go to each website, we want each page to be unique to that brand. Sunbeam should have a different look and feel then Mr. Coffee. The best way to customize it was with WebNative Portal,” Straka said.

WebNative Portal also satisfied the security issues that Jarden Consumer Solutions had regarding protecting its brands while sharing assets via the Internet with brand managers, product managers, sales, field sales, corporate, remote Jarden offices and over 26 advertising agencies.

“Our Portal folder structure allows us to control which group of users has access to what area. With Creative Services departments in Boca Raton, Boston, Miami, Asia and Canada, we restrict the ability to download high-resolution files from our working server until the files are final,” Straka said. “For example, restricting high-resolution access by user name and password means that brand-approved images for the Sunbeam brand won’t be used incorrectly by a manager of the Oster brand without permission.”

“The Xinet system offered answers to our security concerns so it really was the perfect fit for what we needed,” he said. “With Portal, we can actually share our assets with the other servers that we have across the world so there is savings from adding the same solution to different locations. It’s really allowed us to grow and grow quickly.”

Straka said the company had estimated that it would save $150,000 worth of time with its asset management system in the first year but actually hit that mark and saved that amount in just the first three months.

“We’re not only saving the time it took to upload everything but also the amount of people that were able to retrieve these assets so quickly and the amount of placements we are starting to see, so it was a huge pickup quick,” Straka said.

Other Jarden brands include: Ball, Bee, Bicycle, Bionaire, Coleman, Diamond, First Alert, FoodSaver, Health o meter, Kerr, Lehigh, Leslie-Locke, Loew-Cornell, Patton, Seal-a-Meal, VillaWare and White Mountain.