Ensuring Safety and Security in Every Big Orange Box

When you purchase a product from Nugget, you’re getting a lot: a creative launchpad, an indoor escape, a blank canvas for exploration, and much more. But as far as product materials go, you’re only getting two things: foam and fabric.

Our foam and fabric join together in-house through a state-of-the-art, Certified Nuggety process that we’ve designed with best-in-class talent at the helm. While every manufacturing environment presents opportunities for miscellaneous objects to enter the production process, our engineering, operations, and manufacturing teams have gone to great lengths to ensure that each Nugget is made and handled with care — and that your product is free of defects and/or miscellaneous objects for a safe and comfortable experience in your home. Below, we walk through some of the work we’ve done to keep our products, our employees, and our customers safe and top of mind. 

Our Suppliers

The most straightforward way to ensure that we’re shipping quality products that are free of undesired objects is to prevent certain things from entering the building in the first place. That means working with our suppliers to put smart and effective measures in place so that only safe materials are arriving at Nugget HQ. With that in mind, here are some of the commitments we’ve received from our suppliers:

• No small metal parts are used in any of the facilities where our fabrics are cut and sewn. This means that no individual sewing needles, safety pins, or small blades can make their way into our product.
• When repairs are needed, nippers/sewing scissors are used for unstitching, and then the seam is re-sewn using the industrial sewing machine.
• On cork boards or message boards that are used for communication in partner facilities, only tape and/or wire is used to hold things up — no push pins, tacks, nails, or needles are allowed.
• All industrial sewing machine needles are counted at the beginning and end of every shift — any broken needles are accounted for and documented.
• Foam is produced in an environment where no other industrial activities (like cutting and/or sewing) are taking place.
• Foam is shipped to us in plastic bundles (which we bale on-site for recycling), so foreign objects can not enter the foam during shipping.

Our Factory

Like any other place of work, Nugget HQ has objects in the building that we wouldn’t want to ship out in our packages, ranging from the harmless (scraps of test fabric) to the potentially painful (staples). Throughout our entire production process, from start to finish, we put layers of protection in place so that even if something other than foam and fabric did make its way to the production line, it would be caught and removed long before going out the door. These efforts include:

• Regularly inspecting the supply bins used by our production team to ensure no other objects or debris are present
• Regular check-ins with production team leads and longest-tenured staff members about production activity and any observations or trends
• Team members positioned so that every Nugget passes through at least five, and as many as eight, sets of eyes and hands before leaving our building
• Full clean-ups performed after every engineering modification to the production line, including sweeps for any tools, debris, or miscellaneous objects
• Full vacuuming of the compression machine and its underside during weekly preventative maintenance
• All teams performing a sweep of their individual stations (including conveyors) daily

By far, the most important reason for all of these processes is to keep anything that could be potentially dangerous for our Nuggeteers far away from the products that we ship out of our factory every day. But our team is constantly looking out for other things, too. Our redundant and layered processes in the Nugget HQ manufacturing facility also allow us to catch less serious — but still important! — defects and cosmetic issues before they go out to customers. Every week, Nuggets with defective zipper pulls, small smudges/stains on fabric, seam tears, and/or loose threads, are pulled from the production line and replaced with flawless Nuggets worthy of entering your home. Of course, our team is human and therefore does not catch every cosmetic issue every time, and in the instances where these end up in homes, we make it right with replacement products immediately.

As you can probably tell by now, everyone at Nugget (from our CEO, to our Manufacturing team, to our Customer team, our Product Management team, our suppliers, and beyond) keeps product quality and safety top of mind, even when thousands of products are leaving our building in a single day. For a fun company, there’s nothing we take more seriously.

We also wrote a long post last year about our philosophy around quality, the core team members tasked with living it out, and the practices that keep us in line. As time goes on, we’ll keep building out processes that live up to that philosophy of quality, and keep showing our work with posts like this. To serve our mission of growing imaginations, our policies and procedures need to consistently grow, too, and we welcome your feedback and ideas at any time. You can always reach us at hq@nuggetcomfort.com — we look forward to hearing from you!