C O V E R F E AT U R E
Distribution empire expands through Rome Orgill accelerates into growth with upstate New York DC. By Ken Clark
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t used to be said that the logistics division of a typical retail business would get little attention from customers and corner-office executives — until something went wrong. Those days are over. The global pandemic has elevated the hardware and lumber industry supply chain from a behind-thescenes service to a front-and-center, mission-critical, 24-7, top priority. Case in point: a recent HBSDealer survey asked readers to describe their company’s biggest challenge in the spring of 2021. Supply chain (and the related issue of pricing) generated a whopping 80% of the votes.
Innovative features include an on-premises reverseosmosis station to purify the water (and extend the life) of the batteries in the DC’s forklift fleet.
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Against this background, Memphis, Tenn.-based Orgill is flexing its distribution muscle with the opening of a new distribution center in Rome, N.Y., the company’s eighth. The new facility is remarkable both for the state-of-the-art features culled from Orgill’s book of best practices and industry innovations, and the accelerated timeline used to build it from scratch. When the pandemic hit, Orgill pushed ahead its opening date for the Rome facility by a full year — shooting for the summer of 2021, instead of the original target of summer of 2022. Rome will deliver 17% additional square footage, and even more capacity. (Meanwhile, Orgill is nurturing plans for a distribution-center expansion in the Western U.S. More on that story is expected soon.) The driving factor behind it all, said Orgill CEO Boyden Moore, is “growth.”
JUNE 2021 HARDWARE + BUILDING SUPPLY DEALER
Orgill’s new distribution center in Rome, N.Y., increases the Memphis, Tenn.-based distributor’s DC count to eight.
“Our business grew a lot last year and has grown even more in the first quarter—up over 30%,” he told HBSDealer in an interview inside the Rome facility “We’ve got a lot of opportunities to continue to grow with customers reaching out to us, but we’re committed to getting our service level right first for the customers that we already serve.” Last year, Moore explained the challenges of Orgill involved not only increased demand from Orgill’s core customers, but from customers who turned to Orgill from competing distributors whose supply chains also came under pressure. (Orgill serves over a thousand Ace, True Value, and Do it Best customers as a secondary supplier.). Growth is a tradition at Orgill, founded in 1847. The company grew to sales of $1 billion in 2006. In took 10 more years to hit the $2 billion mark. And in 2020, Orgill crossed the $3 billion
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