Success Story: Cresa + Spoonful of Comfort

Our team recently had the pleasure of working with Spoonful of Comfort on the company's latest warehouse expansion. By analyzing the location of their customers, shipping costs and labor analytics we were able to find an optimal facility location that will enable the company's next growth phase. Cresa's team provided network optimization, transaction management and project management to complete this project on a tight timeline, just before Spoonful's peak season.

Kudos to everyone who had a hand in making this project a success story including, Rick Door, Ron Spencer, Margo Mocarski and Jim McGrath. 

View the transcript below. 

Marti Wymer, Founder and CEO, Spoonful of Comfort 

At Spoonful of Comfort, we send gift packages, but we focus on the occasions mostly associated with comfort, get well, sympathy, new baby. And we take that very seriously. I like to say, I think it's how we send our packages that differentiates us from everybody else. The thought and love and care that we put into when we send a package out to a customer. 

Steven Wymer, COO, Spoonful of Comfort 

We're facing a lot of complexities in our business. Sixty percent of our shipments were going to the East Coast and as a result of that, we really needed to dive deep into understanding what could we do to mitigate some of those challenges and enhance our customer experience. 

Scott Gustafson, President, Spoonful of Comfort 

We have been shipping out of one location for the 13 years of our initial growth and our growth is accelerating and we need to be there in the local markets, closer to the Northeast quadrant.  And being able to hire somebody like Cresa to come in help us do the analysis to decide where the best location would be for us was key. 

Rick Door, Managing Principal, Cresa 

We needed to find a warehouse, but not only just a warehouse. We need to find a warehouse that had freezer space and a lot of freezer space because they flash freeze all their products so that when you get your product two days later, it's all unfrozen. And so, finding freezer space is like finding a needle in a haystack. 

They didn't only just need a warehouse, they were really shifting their business. So we brought in our network optimization team to look at where is the best place for their second warehouse. First one being in Salt Lake City, second one could be anywhere. So, what we did is we looked at where are most of Spoonful's customers? The second thing we looked at were shipping costs, both in and out of the facility. We also looked at the labor analytics to see where could they hire people, where were the most cost effective places for their people to live. And then we shifted through. The cost of real estate and we looked all up and down the East Coast. The actual center of the spot was in Lancaster, PA. We ended up finding the location with freezer space, which was a very important piece of the puzzle in Lancaster, PA.  And it worked out fantastic and we finished the process. 

Scott: 

One of the things that I can honestly say is that we always felt like Cresa was on our side.  In the negotiation of the lease, there were several terms that the landlord was pushing back on and the Cresa team just did a fantastic job of negotiating that to be able to get us to the point where it really made sense for us and it was a win, win. 

Steven: 

And to be able to have the resources that Cresa brought to us, not just getting us the site location and doing all the studies, but also bringing the experts to help us build out the location, to get the contractors to get the talent to really push the project faster was really something we could have never done on our own.