Topps Gets to Market Faster with Xinet

With its products known and treasured worldwide, The Topps Company makes the culturally iconic Bazooka Bubble Gum, Garbage Pail Kids, and collectible baseball, football and basketball trading cards. What is not widely known is that the $300 million, New York-based company uses the Xinet^® digital asset management system to keep track of its products and get its merchandise on the shelf faster.

Greg A. Pedersen
The Topps Company

“Xinet’s system gives us an advantage because it helps us keep track of all our brands and products, and streamlines production so that our film dates have closed a lot faster,” said Greg A. Pedersen, LAN Manager at Topps. “It’s important for us to get that product out on the shelf fast, and there is no way we could have done that with any other system, or the way we used to work. This product streamlined that tremendously.”

With offices in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, Brazil, Argentina and the U.S., Topps employs more than 420 people worldwide and also manufactures the popular lollipop brands such as Ring Pops, Push Pops, Baby Bottle Pops, and sticker collections and comic books.

“We went with Xinet because it has the best product out there, especially for us. We didn’t want to change our workflow too much because we have a special workflow,” Pedersen said. “We actually had [Northplains] Telescope here in-house, but we didn’t use it. It wasn’t user friendly enough.”

Thanks to a history that dates back to 1938 and because of modern digital cameras that shoot pictures at breathtaking speed, Topps Trading has an enormous library of digital photographs.

“Our photo crew goes through thousands and thousands of images. For example, when we start baseball Spring Training, we got photographers shooting away with their cameras like machine guns. With those fast cameras, they shoot so many digital pictures, the players look like they’re animated. The photo editors then weed out the shots that we’re never going to use and with the WebNative® Suite database,

Needless to say, the WebNative Suite database at Topps Trading Co. is always in heavy use.

“We have 30 artists hitting the database all the time. We have two main vendors outside, tons of different users coming in on our server using WebNative and sending files and doing work, not to mention globally we have Topps in England, Topps in Italy, Topps in South America, manufacturers in China, and design places everywhere. They all have WebNative accounts that access the images on our server. There are no FTP sites that they have to go on. We don’t use FTP sites, just WebNative, and for them it’s very easy. Within five minutes we can make them an account and they just log in through any browser and they are sending their files,” Pedersen said.