Jofran building 3rd U.S. distribution center near Charleston

HIGH POINT — Home furnishings importer Jofran is building a 365,000-square-foot distribution center in Summerville, S.C., near Charleston that will speed up service to retailers across the Southeast.

The custom-built, high-cube facility is slated to open in September of 2021 and will be the value-based importer’s third U.S. distribution point. The others are a roughly 250,000-square-foot facility in Norfolk, Mass., and a third-party-logistics operation in Los Angeles. 

The latter holds up to about 250 containers worth of inventory for Jofran. When the South Carolina facility is at its maximum capacity, it will support roughly 1,500 containers, Jofran CEO Joff Roy told Home News Now. He declined to disclose the company’s investment other than to say it’s “significant.”

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Presently, on the domestic side, Jofran services its Southeastern retail customers through the Norfolk facility, but Roy noted most take advantage of a blend of its Vietnam warehouse and domestics operations, and that won’t change when the South Carolina complex is up and running, but rather will further support that strategy.

“It’s a good distribution point,” Roy said of the Summerville location, one that will work well for retailers across Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, plus, “We’ll get a significant amount of national play out of South Carolina.

“Basically, it’s in Charleston. We’re close to the port, and we’re very pleased with the way the state operates in that regard.

“But the reason for our placement there, summed up very simply, is we need to put our product where the customers are, and the markets in the (Southeast) continue to grow.”

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While the plans for the South Carolina distribution center were in the works before the COVID-19 pandemic and would have gone on, regardless, Roy said the surge in demand Jofran has seen since the lockdown ended has exacerbated the need for additional warehousing — not so much in the short term but over the long term. 

Jofran’s business since Memorial Day has been tremendous, he said, with written orders over the past 15 weeks a little more than double the rate from a year ago. 

The reason, he said, goes back to the company’s strong inventory position at a time when demand is high and the industry is facing major inventory shortages across the board. When COVID hit, Roy said Jofran didn’t rush to pull the plug on production and gave the go-ahead to its factory partners to ship up until at least the second week of May. There were slight delays when certain Asian producers shut down for two weeks to a month, “but generally speaking, we’re in reasonably good shape and rebounding very well here in September and in October,” Roy said.

“From what we hear on the street we’re in much better inventory position than most on the supply side.”

The few delays there have been are “mostly on the container side and a little on the labor side,” he said, and there are some challenges getting on board the freight ships now, “so we’re not as dialed into the exact dates as we would like to be.”

“But we’re very very actively flowing product right now,” Roy added. “We are not held up. We’re not going to be delayed by months.”

Home News Now caught up with Roy during Premarket, where Jofran had seen its first customer as early as Thursday, days before the official opening. Roy said he was expecting retailers to be interested in both in-line goods and new product given the industry-wide supply chain disruption. 

As for new, Jofran was showing several occasional tables, two dining room collections and some accent pieces, among other things. And the introductions were split about even with two delivery windows in mind — half that are in stock or will be within the next 30 days, and half slated for delivery around January.

“One of the things we’re seeing is that most of our, medium-size importing accounts are continuing to climb up the supply chain on us.,” Roy said, noting that they’re ordering out much further than they used to because of the supply disruption they’re seeing elsewhere. 

If they were ordering four containers a month before, now they’re ordering 20, trying to secure that steady flow and assuming Jofran is in the same position as other overseas resources. 

“We are (able to meet the new demand) and it’s actually very helpful for us because we’re able to better dial into what our production (needs will be) over the next several months,” he said.

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