Watch It Made Blog

Harry and David Holmes began mailing Royal Riviera pears around the country as mail-order gifts in the 1930s. Since then, their company has grown into a giant purveyor of edible gifts: the famous Harry and David, headquartered in Medford, Oregon.

The $5 it costs to tour the gift-packing factory is money well spent. The holiday season is a special time to take the tour, for you can witness the packing and wrapping of the Tower of Treats: five boxes, each containing a different product such as fruit, cookies, or cheese, are stacked in a tower and wrapped with a ribbon. From an overhead balcony, you can watch as each worker fills a box and passes it to the next person, who covers the box with a lid and adds another box on top. Once all five boxes are stacked, one member of a two-person team holds the ribbon, while the other wraps the ribbon around the tower and adds a bow and some baubles on top. Ribbons fly as each team assembles up to 1,500 towers a day.

Elsewhere, workers hand-pack exquisite baskets. Each packer receives a wooden box containing all of the components (e.g. fruit, preserves, nuts, candies), the basket itself, and a Styrofoam form resembling a cowboy hat. After the packer fills the basket, it is transported by conveyor belt to workers who cover it with cellophane and send it to the shrink-wrap machine.

In the bakery, workers prepare fruit galettes, cookies, and cheesecakes by hand. Sweet smells drift from the candy kitchen, where vats with rotating blades stir deep baths of liquid chocolate. Here you can watch workers pour the chocolate into molds. Then the candy goes through the enrober, the cooling chamber, and the cool room before being packed and frozen for later use in gift boxes.

Lots of other factory tours in Watch It Made are perfect for the holidays. Come to think of it, so is our book. You can order a copy right now on this website.

Eyewitness reports from Vermont say that this has been an especially good autumn for colorful foliage, and it's not too late to see the vivid hues of fall in southern Vermont. If you drive up scenic Route 7 north of Bennington, and have an interest in field sports, you may want to visit the home of the Orvis Company in Manchester, where the firm has been making fly-fishing rods since 1856.

The products of Orvis have greatly expanded since the company began. In fact, many people know Orvis now more for its widely sold line of clothing than for its fishing rods. However, the tour in Manchester is solely about the company's original core business of producing equipment for fly fishing. In addition to still crafting rods of the traditional bamboo, the company now also makes modern carbon-fiber rods. These are the industry standard for modern anglers who still enjoy the peaceful ancient pastime of fly fishing: wading into cold streams to catch trout with special rods and a wide array of lures exquisitely crafted to resemble insects.

You begin the tour by walking through hallways that display pictures of rod manufacture over the past century, while your guide talks about the history and craft of this profession. Most of the rods Orvis sells are made of various graphite composites, using materials and technology pioneered by the aerospace and defense industries. These techniques yield a powerful rod that is still sensitive enough for accurate line control and casting. The graphite needs to be stored in freezers in flat sheets. These are then turned into blanks that are cut into shapes, molded, and baked for almost two hours at 250°F. After sanding, the high-end rods get three coats of finish, finely polished with a final layer that blocks ultraviolet light. In the assembly area, 10 to 20 people put on the butts, cork grips, and guides.

You also see craftsmen fixing rods. Although Orvis rods rarely need repair and come with a 25-year guarantee, freak damage occasionally occurs in the wild—for example, when an angler is forced to use a rod to repel a bear! After such episodes, owners can send their rods to the factory for repair (with or without a good story).

Following the tour, you can take a lesson in casting at the edge of the nearby pond, which is stocked with trout, though hopefully no bears.

All of New England is gorgeous in the fall, and trees in the southern areas are showing peak autumn colors right now. For more ideas on factory tours in New England or anywhere else in the US, see our book Watch It Made in the U.S.A.

Throughout the year, you can tour Sally’s factory at its headquarters in palm-lined downtown Jacksonville. Tours begin in a small theater, where a live presentation introduces the art of the dark ride. At the core of this craft is animatronics: the craft of building robots in accurate likenesses of humans and animals that are programmed to perform intricate lifelike movements, synchronized with a recorded soundtrack. A demonstration, including an interactive game for the audience, illustrates the complex technology that shapes these displays.

The heart of the tour is a detailed look at the areas where the creative staff build their dark rides. After ideas emerge from the design studio, they come to life in the various workspaces of the production floor. Populated with a weird and wonderful array of heads and creatures, the sculpting room is where the animatronic figures acquire their basic forms before the technicians integrate the robotics that make them move. The finish-art department gives them their personality: artists apply skin tone, hair, and the other attributes that endow their creations with vivid and sometimes startling realism. In the programming area, the movements and sounds of each figure are coordinated with lifelike precision. Meanwhile, the scenic-painting room is where artists color the outlandish dreamscapes of Sally productions.

However, the biggest wows occur in the main space of the production floor itself, where all the elements come together. Depending on where the production cycle is during your visit, you may see the spectacular culmination of the current big project or watch the industrious beginning of the next. Whatever the case, you will certainly see the huge resident Tyrannosaurus rex, rising with menace (and many teeth) from its metal enclosure. But this sample colossus is at only one end of the creative staff’s range. Nearby, a tropical display features exquisite tiny singing birds, a virtuoso achievement of animatronics on a small scale.

Heading to Florida for the winter season? Planning a warm vacation for the cold months? Look up more Floridian factory tours in the pages of Watch It Made.

With offices only two miles from Fenway Park, Watch It Made lives amid baseball fever every summer. So it was only natural for us to visit the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory in Kentucky when researching our book on factory tours. With the pennant races in full throttle and the school vacations in the doldrums, August seems an especially good time to see how the famous Louisville Slugger baseball bats are made.

Created by Bud Hillerich in 1884, the Louisville Slugger has been swung by such baseball heroes as Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig, and Joe DiMaggio. In 1996, the Hillerich & Bradsby Company opened the Louisville Slugger Museum in Louisville, KY. On display are actual bats swung by some of the most famous hitters in the baseball's history. Among the many attractions, you can take the field in a replica of Camden Yards, home of the Baltimore Orioles. Choose a famous pitcher to throw the ball in your direction at 90 miles per hour, or step into a batting cage and take a few swings.

Visitors can also take a guided factory tour. Amid the ubiquitous smell of wood, H&B turns billets of maple and northern white ash into Louisville Slugger bats. Most are made on automatic lathes. It takes about 40 seconds to make a bat on the tracer lathes. Workers use a metal pattern of the exact bat shape and guide the machine to trace this pattern—the process is similar to copying a key at a hardware store. All of the bats used in Major League Baseball are made on a special CNC lathe, the only one of its kind in the world.

The famous oval trademark is seared into the wood, along with the bat's model number. Sometimes a player's autograph is still emblazoned on the "flat of the grain." Bats can also be foil-branded with either gold or silver. Behind the branders, large cabinets hold more than 8,500 professional players' autograph brands.

Planning a "staycation" instead of a summer road-trip this year? Bear in mind that your baseball team's home stadium may offer a guided tour, giving you some behind-the-scenes baseball action close to home. In addition, there may be any number of interesting factory tours right in your area—perfect for day-trips. Check our book Watch It Made to find out.