Our new 2nd home! Easthampton here we come!

As we begin celebrating our 38th Anniversary, we are excited to share some BIG news with all of you!

Back in 2007, we renovated our current building in Northampton so we could be as efficient as possible. Our current location houses the store, our shipping group and all of our staff (and a little bit of yarn too). We were told we’d get 5 more years of growth in the newly designed space and the contractors we worked with were right. Although Kathy & I had hoped to stretch it out a bit longer, we began to realize a little more than a year ago that it was unlikely.

For several months (OK 14 months to be exact) Kathy and I have been debating what to do as WEBS continued to grow and we started running out of space. We needed to hire more people but there was no place to put a new desk. Our pickers started tripping over each other and it got harder to get orders out the door in the building we’ve called home since 1991. Simply put, we’ve done all we can do to our home in Northampton and its just not working for us anymore.  It was time to find a new space.

As usually happens in our relationship, Kathy was sold on the idea first and it took a while to convince me – sound familiar to anyone who knows the WEBS history? We’re pretty risk averse folks so the idea of buying a buidling for our shipping operations was not one that we took on lightly!  Beside the financial implication, we were also both very concerned how it would affect the culture of our organization – and how it would affect Kathy & I.  We share an office and although not joined at the hip, we do work closely together.  A separate location for the e-commerce portion of our business would mean Kathy would spend most of her day in the Northampton location while I would be at the “other” building.  This all weighed on us for many months but finally the perfect building and situation came along.

And here we are! Today we signed the papers to purchase our new warehouse in Easthampton, just six miles from the store. Our shipping and customer service folks will be moving over and the store will remain in Northampton. THE STORE WILL REMAIN IN NORTHAMPTON. IT IS NOT MOVING. We’re not really yelling, just emphasizing!

Assuming all goes well, we hope to be shipping out of our new warehouse by the middle of June. We are really excited (and a bit nervous too) about the change. It is the biggest thing we’ve done since my parents moved the store from the old Victorian house on Kellogg Avenue in Amherst to an old telephone company building in Northampton on a street named Service Center Road.

We know some of you will be disappointed that this isn’t a new store location or even a warehouse location further west, but I hope you can all be happy for us.  As always, our goal is to simply make shopping with us the best it can be and both Kathy & I feel that this will of course benefit those of you who shop on-line with us but also our local shoppers in the store.  I’m sure we’ll have some glitches along the way and we hope you’ll be understanding.

We’ll share more of the move progress over the next couple of months. It will be an exciting time for all of us. Here we go!

Steve and Kathy