For an "invisible company," The Jay Group has a sizable footprint in Lancaster County.

Still, many people driving by the company's new 250,000-square-foot corporate offices and warehouse off Marietta Pike in West Hempfield Township — or its even larger 272,000-square-foot complex in the Conewago Industrial Park in Elizabethtown — may have only the vaguest idea of what goes on there.

They may have even done business with The Jay Group and not known it.

If they bought Absolut vodka, for instance, and responded to a promotional offer on the bottle, the address would have been The Jay Group's, but without the company's name, said Kelly Smedley, Jay Group's marketing director.

Or they may have unknowingly written or sent e-mail to The Jay Group to request a rebate or enter one of the numerous sweepstakes the company handles for consumer-product manufacturers.

They may even have spoken on the phone with one of The Jay Group's 500 employees and not known it.

Say they bought a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner and ended up calling iRobot, the manufacturer, for help in using it: The expert on the other end of the service call would have been an employee of The Jay Group, not iRobot.

And those examples cover just some of the company's 97 clients.

"The thing about The Jay Group is we're an invisible company," Smedley said. "That's what our customers want."

In the spotlight
Despite being "invisible," The Jay Group has had a pretty high-profile year, centered mostly on its new corporate headquarters.

In October, months before most employees moved in, President Bush used the new $26-million building as the main venue for his visit to Lancaster County.

The company started moving products into the new warehouse about that time, and shifted employees there in December.

The Jay Group has been growing about 20 percent a year during the past six years and needed more room, Smedley said.

The new center has allowed The Jay Group to consolidate offices, packaging operations and data processing from three smaller sites in Ronks, New Holland and Smoketown.

Oasis of Hope in Bird-in-Hand now owns the Ronks site, and Windy Hill Properties in Paradise owns the New Holland site. The Smoketown site had been leased.

"For years and years, we really used to patch it together," said Dana Chryst, the company's principal owner and CEO. "At one time we had eight different [locations]. That obviously slows you down a lot."

The new complex is only about half occupied now, allowing for continued growth, particularly in corporate offices, she said.

Eventually, Chryst said, the company will probably also expand elsewhere.

"Some of our clients are partnering with people that will come in and take over one of their facilities," she said. "This facility will be the brain center for that kind of growth."

Yet to be completed in the new complex is The Jay Cafe, a 100-seat cafeteria that will overlook the courtyard and fountain, and serve as a catering service for clients.

"Dana really had employees in mind when she built this building," Smedley said.

Such amenities have helped the company repeatedly gain recognition as one of the best places to work in Pennsylvania.

Most of the challenges the company faces revolve around the talent of its employees, Chryst said.

To succeed in an increasingly competitive marketplace, she explained, a creative company like The Jay Group has to have talented people and make sure they're well-supplied with the tools and resources they need to do their jobs.

"It all starts with great people," Chryst said.

Fulfillment
A large component of The Jay Group's multifaceted business involves shipping products for such clients as Healthy Directions, which sells vitamins.

The company ships between 7,000 and 10,000 products a day from its new warehouse, and another 5,000 to 7,000 products a day from Elizabethtown, Smedley said.

The Jay Group also does a lot of promotional repackaging of products for such clients as Johnson & Johnson.

"Everything Johnson & Johnson does is automated," Smedley explained. "They don't want to change their machines to do promotional packaging."

If Johnson & Johnson wants to offer two bottles of Listerine mouthwash for the price of one or package a small tube of toothpaste with another product, it sends them to The Jay Group to be repackaged.

"We also have our own design engineers to tell us how to do it and do it thousands of times over," Smedley said. "That's how we bring value to the market."

The new warehouse, which the company calls a fulfillment center, was built with many state-of-the-art features.

For instance, its forklifts use an electrical wire-guided system to maneuver through narrow, nearly zero-clearance aisles to pick products off the warehouse's four-story-high shelves. And its workers use radio-frequency scanners at every step to ensure the right products get shipped to the right addresses.

Smedley likens the conveyor system that moves items through packaging and shipping operations to the log flume at Hershey Park.

"This is all about time and … how many steps [workers] have to take," Smedley said. "It's all about trying to [reduce] the number of steps."

Rivaling the warehouse and packaging operations are the company's call centers, which serve such companies as Reebok, Heineken, iRobot and lots more, Smedley said.

About half the people answering the phones deal with calls for a single client. The others handle calls for multiple companies, a less-expensive option for the clients.

All receive extensive training on the companies they're responsible for.

The workers who take Roomba calls, for example, have been trained so they can disassemble the vacuum cleaners, and they have parts and cleaners at hand when they talk with customers.

There has been a trend of companies moving their call centers out of the country to save money, Smedley said, but some of those companies are coming back.

A strong selling point for The Jay Group's call centers is the type of people who answer the phone.

"Obviously it's a domestic voice," Smedley said.

In addition to that, she said, people in Lancaster County have a reputation for expressing empathy when they talk on the phone.

Tailored services
There's a lot more to what The Jay Group does than just answer calls and ship products.

Every company markets itself differently, Smedley said, so The Jay Group has to tailor its services to fit the specialized needs of each client.

The work it does for Heineken, for example, doesn't involve any of the company's brand-name beers — which include Amstel, Dos Equis and Tecate — but it does include everything else the company does with its brands, such as displays for beer distributors, and promotional T-shirts and hats for special events.

The Jay Group handles every aspect of Heineken's promotions, from designing the materials to obtaining bids from vendors to handling the billing for the work to shipping the finished promotional materials wherever they're needed.

Chryst said her father, Jay, the founder and namesake of the company, used to tell people The Jay Group was in the "lick 'em, stick 'em business."

Now, the company does all the management and administration for many of its clients, as well.

"We are their marketing execution arm," Chryst said.

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Dennis Larison is editor of the Business section and can be reached by telephone at 291-8753 or by e-mail at dlarison@lnpnews.com.