ADX is the home for design and innovation for on-garment branding and a customer experience center within existing space on the lower level of the company’s 320,000-square-foot Miamisburg facility. The “ADX” acronym is short for Avery Dennison Experience.
The lab serves as a high-tech playground for customers, including major performance brands and globally-famous sports teams and organizations, to view a wide range of options available for digitally-enabled physical embellishments. That includes using smart technology in conjunction with sportswear team name and numbering via Avery Dennison’s Embelex products.
Those products enable consumers to use their smart phones to scan special jersey emblems or patches that unlock exclusive content, including promotional offers and events.
“You could very easily see a local soccer club that might need 50 jerseys come in here and do something through one of our smaller distributors or you could see (a major performance brand) sitting in here,” said Michael Barton, vice president and general manager for Avery Dennison Apparel Solutions. “So this will be open to ... the big brands and even to local designers and what we call halo brands, just small guys that are trying to build their brand up.”
Being able to do on site in Miamisburg helps customers better understand the technological potential of on-garment branding and apparel labels and tags. It also gives Avery Dennison the ability to drive personalization at scale, officials said.
The ADX Labs process also means reducing the amount of time it takes to finalize design for and create a product, Barton said.
“You’re taking a process that takes 60 to 90 days, where (now) you can do it on the fly down to 2 or 10 days, depending on how many iterations you do just by not having to see and touch the physical product,” Barton said. “By trusting the digital, understanding techniques and fabrications and how we educate them on that, it really does, for our piece of the puzzle, short track the process.
“On the screen, you can really see different techniques come to life on the spot and say ‘No. That one’s out. This one looks good. Let’s run with this one.’ ”
Locating ADX and its Embelex products in Miamisburg demonstrates the company’s “continued commitment” to the Ohio area, Barton said. “This will kind of be our central point for the United States on how we think about innovation across our business,” he said.
The ADX Lab in Miamisburg is Avery Dennison’s latest location to open, joining innovation and experiential hubs in Norway, Italy and two locations in China.
Avery Dennison employs approximately 36,000 people in more than 50 countries. Reported sales in 2021 were $8.4 billion.
The company plans to continue growing its workforce in Miamisburg. Staffing numbers 552 employees, with 113 new hires in the last year. There are more than 30 open positions in customer service, sales, marketing, operations, engineering, finance and other roles.
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