ATLANTA (June 25, 2010) – FSI recently displayed at the 2010 Cobb Chamber of Commerce B2B Expo. We met a lot of great local businesses and saw a lot of friends and clients who stopped by our booth. Topics and demonstrations included FSI's custom kit assembly, product, literature and promotional order fulfillment, and we also had the opportunity to show off the latest in our online capabilities with our online reporting and catalogs. Check out FSI's VP / GM being interviewed at the show.

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If you’re going to do something nice for others, maybe something that might hurt “just a little”, then why not do it together amongst friends, right? FSI recently made another group visit to donate blood at the local Red Cross donation center. It’s becoming quite a routine for FSI employees to do their part of giving back to the community by donating together. Your body can donate every 56 days, so we make it a point to schedule our next appointment as close to that 56 days as possible. Did you know that (from www.redcrossblood.org):

• Every two seconds someone in the U.S. needs blood.
• More than 38,000 blood donations are needed every day.
• A total of 30 million blood components are transfused each year in the U.S. (2006).
• The average red blood cell transfusion is approximately 3 pints.
• The blood type most often requested by hospitals is Type O.
• The blood used in an emergency is already on the shelves before the event occurs.
• Sickle cell disease affects more than 80,000 people in the U.S., 98 percent of whom are African American.
Sickle cell patients can require frequent blood transfusions throughout their lives.
• More than 1 million new people are diagnosed with cancer each year. Many of them will need blood, sometimes daily, during their chemotherapy treatment.
• A single car accident victim can require as many as 100 pints of blood.

Pictured above are FSI’s Betty Stringer, Beth Williams, Forrest Marbutt and Graylin Crawford. Also, pictured is Forrest’s 4 gallon pin he recently earned. That’s a minimum of 32 donations, or at least 5 years worth of routine donating every 56 days! Come join us for our next donation, or make an appointment for yourself today at www.redcrossblood.org.

FSI is honored to be named as one of the Top 25 small businesses by the Cobb Chamber of Commerce. Since 2008, FSI has been chosen in the top 25 based on a wide range of factors including financial strength, an ongoing and tangible commitment to community involvement, and numerous criteria published by the U.S. Small Business Administration.

With an almost unheard-of order accuracy rate of 99.9% and a sales growth of 13.9% during one of the roughest economies ever to hit the fulfillment world, FSI certainly is proud of some key accomplishments. Like everyone else, we have had to find creative ways to streamline our operations and have found a number of ways of doing so without negatively impacting service, but we strongly feel that these investments in a down economy will continue to pay dividends, especially as the economy begins the inevitable rebound.

FSI expresses deep gratitude to the stellar Clients and employees who continue to make FSI the fulfillment provider of choice for a growing number of America’s best companies.

FSI wishes to bid a fond farewell to a truly great Client, Guitar Hero, with whom we have enjoyed a great relationship. Guitar Hero has decided to shut down their eCommerce store, which means that they will no longer need FSI to fulfill their orders for them. Guitar Hero (formerly RedOctane), initially awarded FSI with the fulfillment of all merchandise sold through their popular eCommerce site. Once they got a good feel for our responsiveness and ability to streamline key portions of the customer experience, they extended our relationship to include the handling of sizable warranty programs.



One enabling feature was FSI’s ability to bring together key pieces of data at different stages of the warranty/replacement process and make it available to their Customer Service teams in a way that previously was not possible. This enabled their CSRs to be able to resolve a far greater percentage of support requests while the customer was on the phone – all by logging into the FSI Enterprise reporting portal. (By the way, can your fulfillment provider do that?)

Guitar Hero was an account we were particularly proud of due to the multiple levels of integration that showed off FSI’s technical capabilities particularly well. But even more importantly it highlighted the terrific job our Customer Service and Warehouse teams did in handling rapidly changing volumes, with volume spikes during the holidays and throughout the year during new product launches. It wasn’t unheard of for the Warehouse to be greeted on Monday morning with a stack of packing slips 4,000 sheets high, all of which had to be accurately picked, packed, and shipped same-day. At least there were only about 400 different products to deal with.

But I digress. Guitar Hero was recently acquired by Activision, and the decision was made to eliminate the eCommerce site and focus strictly on building the business in retail channels. So the next time you purchase a cool Guitar Hero product, it’ll have to come from a reseller rather than be shipped from FSI. They will be missed!

More details of the plans are freely available on the web such as http://www.edge-online.com/news/activision-closes-red-octane

Team in Training (TNT) is an organization that trains participants for endurance events, such as, marathons, triathlons, adventure races, century rides, etc., and the participants in turn raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society in exchange for this training. FSI’s Vice President & General Manager, Forrest Marbutt, has participated in several of these events in the past raising thousands of dollars for the cause and has been supported by FSI in his efforts. Even when Forrest is not actively participating in an event, FSI continues to support the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society by continuously sponsoring a current TNT racer.

FSI’s current sponsored TNT racer is Joanna Berentsen. Joanna and Forrest got to know each other through a previous TNT event when they were teamed up together in an adventure race (each team of 3 must complete the entire race together). Joanna’s current race is the St. Anthony’s Triathlon. Want to make a real difference? Join the fight to find a cure by donating directly to Joanna’s fundraising page at http://pages.teamintraining.org/ga/Augusta10/jberentsen. Or even better, sign up for an event today at www.teamintraining.org!

See below where Joanna (wearing a hat) is helping Forrest scale the 14’ wall in their previous adventure race just before their team finish in close to 5 hours.

Pictured left to right: Jay Gustafson, Lance Smith, Ken Donnelly, and FSI's Ken Marbutt

FSI has been an active member in the Printing & Imaging Association of Georgia for years, so we figured we might as well have the decency to win the 2009 golf outing. So just to show our support for this fine organization, FSI Founder and President Ken Marbutt and his team took first place in the Low Net division.

Now wait a minute. The number of golfing events Ken has won sure is growing lately. How can he have time for this and make sure FSI keeps Clients happy at the same time? We must be doing something right while he's out on the links...

One of the great things about working at FSI is the chance to be involved with some really cool promotional campaigns for startups and Fortune 100 companies alike. Take our very first kit-packing job when the doors opened in 1996 for example. The job entailed 200,000 fun packs of various Spider-Man comics and a dozen related items for a national hotel chain. Or more recently assembling what appear to be giant Chinese-style takeout boxes filled with fortune cookies for a global news organization (no added MSG!). Or even a customized box sent to over 25,000 employees of the IRS that, when opened, an animated hand playfully pokes the recipient in the eye.

Now maybe I made up that last one, although of course we all agree it is a terrific idea. Please contact the FSI sales team if you’d like to partner with us on that one. But the point is we enjoy working with Clients who make an impact with novel and imaginative products and promotions.

And in this economy, innovation is key. Certain types of cutbacks are unavoidable, but bland marketing campaigns are almost worse than doing nothing at all. Check out the article Humor Me, written by Phaedra Hise and published in Deliver Magazine. It caught our attention because FSI is so good at handling these types of custom kit-packing jobs, which, as the article points out, can be enormously effective marketing tools.

Maybe your customers don’t need an enormous box of fortune cookies, but give them something to remember you by with the confidence that FSI delivers on each and every job.

A total of 27 FSI employees and friends joined in on October 17, 2009 for a 5K run sponsored by the Make-A-Wish foundation. Taking us through the historic Marietta Square district, the event was just one of many that occurred all over the country to raise money for children with terminal illnesses. The event organizer noted that FSI had one of the largest number of participants in the event that drew an estimated 1,015 runners. Wish.org reports that as of the time of the event, over 184,000 wishes have been granted. FSI is proud to have had a small part in the next one.