Fournier is located in the Basque Country, the industrious region in the north of Spain. The company is headquartered in the ancient and charming city of Vitoria, about a 45 minute drive inland from the port of Bilbao. 

On Friday morning I visited the factory, which is in a large steel building in an industrial park on the outskirts of the city. Shortly after I arrived at the factory, I was taken down to the production floor. If there was something that Fournier wanted me to take away from the visit was a sense of how important quality is to them. Here are some examples of how this was conveyed: 

1. Each sheet of casino cards is inspected by hand because Fournier believes that the trained human eye can still do a better job than the video inspection machines at spotting any printing imperfections. And I watched the inspectors peer into each sheet of printed cards, one by one. By the way, the Fournier poker cards that we sell – such as the Vision series – undergo the same quality control procedures as casino cards. 

 2. I received long, detailed explanations by the various machine operators of their job functions. I noticed a Tarot of Marseille being put through a pre-production quality control process. The employees at Fournier were obviously proud of their work and a high percentage appeared to have worked there for decades. The factory floor was spotless and on the line the workers quickly, but quietly, moved about in their blue smocks. 

 3. Fournier has designed machines that they believe meet higher tolerances than off-the-shelf technology. For example, the cutting machines cut the entire card out of the sheet in one piece (rather than in strips). The managers showed me processes that they believe other manufacturers do not take in the production process. The formulas for the paper and plastic cardstock are proprietary. 

I unfortunately forgot my camera (and probably wouldn’t have been allowed to take pictures anyway), but hopefully you will get a sense of what I saw. Fournier cards are expensive for us to buy, relative to other brands, but the money seems to go into quality materials and processes, perhaps because so much of their business is casino-oriented. In fact, you leave the factory with the impression that Fournier really is a powerhouse in the casino business – the secure, automated “bunkers” filled with casino orders are a case in point. 

Well, in Spain all business and no play is not the way to go. So late in the afternoon Javier and Roberto, who manage our account, drove me to La Rioja, the famous wine making region. It is only about a 45 minute drive though the mountains on the other side of the valley where Vitoria lies. La Rioja, is not green like the valley that we just had left or the timbered mountains that I traversed on the way from Bilbao. It is dry and brown, but even in winter the hill towns overlooking the vineyards looked heavenly. We enjoyed a long lunch of croquettes, bean soup and grilled lambchops at a beautiful stone and wood restaurant next a winery. I am ashamed to admit that we drank beer instead of wine, but it was unseasonably warm, and we were having a good time. 

Then we toured the nearby Marques del Riscal winery, which is topped with a gleaming Frank Gehry-designed hotel clad in steel and titanium, and is a first class destination. I mention all this simply to say that the Basque Country (and the rest of Spain) is well worth visiting, even in February. Although it is not a sacrifice to travel to a gracious country like Spain, it is important for us in the long term to skew towards quality and be able to report that we have seen it with our own eyes. I expect that Fournier will remain our partner for many years. Thank you.