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As many of you know, last weekend we moved our entire shipping and receiving operation out of four rooms spread across two buildings into one 3,500 sq ft space a little down the hill from our other buildings. Our goal was to have absolutely zero service disruption. This required considerable planning. Everything had to be laid out and organized before a single tin of tobacco would move.
As a quick overview, our main building has three floors and about 5,500 sq. ft. We moved into this space in early 2005, with the store and shipping on the bottom floor, and offices on the top two floors. Our building is surrounded on two sides by a commercial complex with various offices and small shops. Immediately across the parking lot, a building came available and we snatched it up in mid-2009, moving our shipping department, plus customer service and a couple of other offices over there (store, some shipping area, offices, photography studio and pipe restoration workshop remained in the main building). After another two years, our new shipping space was splitting at the seams. The whole company had grown, but especially in those areas that require warehouse space: pipe tobacco and accessories. We talked to our landlord for the smaller building and asked what he had available. The first thing he showed us just wasn't going to work; it was too small and oddly located for freight pickups and dropoffs. Then he had an idea. The end/basement of his largest building contained nothing but his wife's decades worth of accumulated junk (I hope you don't read this, Miss Virginia). We couldn't even get in there past the loading door to look at it properly. I cannot properly articulate how much junk there was, nor quite how junky it was. Everything from a dozen early 1990s vintage computers to thousands of plaster molds to a kid's disney themed play car were in there. Along with displays for flooring, displays of fabric, assorted furniture (including some church pews), a half-dozen aging vacuum cleaners, and about ten ceiling fans. Really, it was what my garage would look like without my wife's intervention. But seven times the size...
It took them three weeks to empty it, but we knew we'd made the right call once we could get in there. It was the perfect space for us. And, instead of picking up 4-6,000 sq feet off-site, it was just a few hundred feet from the building, an easy two or three minute walk. We got a golf cart (which doesn't yet have the Smokingpipes.com logo spinners installed) for moving stuff back and forth. Once it was empty, we went to work. UPS Freight dropped off scarily large stacks of metal shelving, a pallet jack, roller-coveyors and assorted other warehouse goodies. Our preferred builder/handyman Billy Harrelson then went to work with his crew to do the upfit. Two weeks later (one of which was while I was in Chicago for the show), everything was in place. With rigorous use of database queries and excel, Tommy, Susan and I managed to layout the warehouse for optimal picking and packing speed, with higher volume items closer to the central packaging area. We then went to work labeling every single slot that a product (tinned or bulk tobacco or accessory) might inhabit: some 1,500 of them (pipes and cigars remain, as always, in the main building).
On Sunday (the only day of the week that shipping is closed), the entire company (save Mark, who was on vacation), some 25 people, showed up to help move everything. Much to our surprise, most of the work only took about three hours. About half of us stayed on to work out little details and kinks, but we pretty much had it knocked out by noon. By three, it was just five of us left. By four, we were done, complete with running four packages through the whole process to make sure we hadn't forgotten anything and that everything was working. Not one single package was delayed due to the move; everything worked perfectly when shipping resumed Monday morning (well, almost everything).
Bobby Altmann, our staff photographer, snapped a few photos of the work on that Sunday, whenever he wasn't busy shelving tobacco.
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