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6/08/09
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Brown Shoe Company Inc and Clayco Inc recently completed work on a new 350k sf, state-of-the-art distribution center within the Tejon Industrial Complex (TIC) for Famous Footwear. The facility will enable to the company to more efficiently distribute its footwear to stores and consumers on the West Coast.
Clayco, a corporate real estate design-build and construction firm headquartered in St. Louis, acquired the 23.75-acre lot in TIC on which the Famous Footwear DC was built and now leases the new building to Brown Shoe. Clayco went with the TIC location for Famous Footwear's distribution center after a thorough review of potential sites in California and surrounding states.
Tejon Industrial Complex is a 1,450-acre master-planned business park situated at the junction of I-5 and Hwy 99 in Central California. TIC is part of the 270,000-acre Tejon Ranch, the largest contiguous expanse of private land in California.
This strategic location, approximately 90 minutes north of the Los Angeles ports and four hours south of Oakland, gives warehouse operators efficient access to the state's two major port complexes and the ability to serve consumers from San Francisco to San Diego and east to Las Vegas in a one-day truck turn. The site also enables companies to provide round-the-clock, efficient outbound, roundtrip delivery service to 96 percent of California's population and parts of Nevada -- all within the current Federal driver hours of service limitations.
The new Famous Footwear distribution center would have made Imelda Marcos proud, as it has an annual capacity of 32 million pairs of shoes. According to Brown Shoe Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Ron Fromm, “the new facility will provide our company with expected inventory turns 17-22 times per year, which means our stores and web sites will offer shoppers important seasonal footwear trends earlier in the season, and freshen assortments more frequently."
The new facility currently employs about 75 people, and is expected to create approximately 40 additional jobs in upcoming months. Its initial shipping area includes all Famous Footwear stores located west of the Rocky Mountains - approximately one-third of the 1,100-store chain's locations - and will expand later this month to include direct shipping to customers in that geographic area who place orders on FamousFootwear.com.
To enhance the new distribution center with state-of-the-art logistics systems, Brown Shoe partnered with supply chain strategy, design and implementation firm Fortna Inc to integrate best practices for high velocity retail distribution with best of breed equipment and system technologies. The Famous Footwear distribution facility was designed to support business goals for growth capacity, space utilization, handling cost and service performance. New technologies and systems include a cross belt unit sortation system, multiple sliding shoe sorters, a high density storage and picking module, new warehouse management software and the Fortna warehouse control system - FortnaWCS™. Fortna's integrated delivery model included program and project management, site management, design engineering, controls engineering, software engineering, procurement, process design, testing, training and start up assistance.
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