11-09-2021
Why We're Tackling a Major Expansion During the Busiest Time of the Year
FILED IN: Behind-the-Scenes, M&G Happenings
Posted By: Jamie Kutchman
Marigold & Grey is moving! We're expanding from a 6,000 sq ft warehouse to a 14,000 sq ft combo warehouse/office space just a few miles down the road from where we are now. Once renovations are complete, we'll soon have 3,000 sq ft for e-commerce operations, 5,500 for custom gift design production and receiving, and 5,500 for office space. It's a big scary leap but in order to continue innovating and growing, this is the next step. Even after hiring an operations consulting firm in the middle of 2020 to help us better utilize our space as things were becoming super tight, we've long since outgrown their plan for us. Full transparency...this expansion is long overdue. We have been bursting at the seams for a while. So, you might be wondering why in the world we're choosing to up and move during the absolute busiest time of the year!?
There are several reasons and here they are:
Needed satellite space anyway.
We do a large portion of our annual revenue in Q4 and typically need some level of satellite space whether it be for gift assembly or merely just storage space for the sheer magnitude of pallets of product, shipping boxes, and shipping materials that are needed on a daily basis. This year is no exception and satellite space would be needed at such a level that a pod in our parking lot wasn't going to cut it. (Not to mention, we have outgrown our parking lot as it is!) We would need significant satellite space so why not just bite bullet and make the move now and enjoy the extra square footage when we need it most?
The inn is full.
We desperately need to add more full-time team members to our existing crew but we have no where to put them. Our current space is most all warehouse space and has a very industrial feel. It's noisy and not conducive for Zoom meetings and client calls with the constant sound of tape guns taping and Fedex drivers coming in and saying hello and music playing and well, you get the idea. Our new space has 10 private offices. This will allow for everyone who needs a private office to have one along with a separate sample room. conference room, and one or two offices remaining to hire for the positions we're hiring for! We've been serving well-known brands and luxury clients for years now but there is something to be said for us being able to come to work in a much more professional environment versus everything being completely out in the open.
We've done harder things.
You may remember our building fire we experienced two years ago and all the lessons learned from that. This crisis hit us just before holiday rush, we lost almost all of our inventory, and had zero clue this was going to hit us. Yet, we came together as a team and ended up having a very successful year. With this move, the timing may be inopportune, but at least we know it's coming. We can plan for it. We can most definitely handle a move down the street without any interruption in our service to our clients. We've done harder things.
Q1 for planning and innovating, not moving.
January isn't a time of rest for us because it's extremely popular for New Year's gifting. We close the business between Christmas and New Years to allow our team a time to relax and unplug after the chaos that is the holiday season for us. But when we come back, while I'd love to say that we take time to reflect back on the year prior and immediately jump into business planning for the upcoming year, that is far from the case. It's an additional month of holiday volume for us. So, January isn't a calm time to move either. If we wait until February when our extreme rush months are over, it would be March before we could really do the planning necessary to get the year off to a great start. Instead of waiting, it's essential that we do this now so we can use the beginning of the year to look ahead versus facing a move.
Call us crazy but this we like to think of this as calculated crazy. This expansion helps us get where we want to be sooner rather than later. Let's rip off the band aid and just make it happen. We hope you'll stay tuned as we share even more sneak peeks of the new space along with true 'before and after's' once it's all done. In the meantime, we're busy sorting out the floor plans for the new space, making paint selections (and agonizing over them of course!), making flooring selections, and all kinds of other renovation things! Wish us luck! This will not impact our ability to meet deadlines for any of our clients, in fact, quite the opposite. But if you have any questions whatsoever, please feel free to reach us here. We always love hearing from you!
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