Coating | New Centers Add Service for Spinnaker Customers
- Published: November 12, 2012
TROY, OH | When Spinnaker Coating, a manufacturer of adhesive-coated papers and films, recently opened two new distribution centers—one outside of Atlanta and one in the Los Angeles area—it was a move that echoes the company’s philosophy precisely. Spinnaker executive VP George Fuehrer, says, “For our customer base—the label converters—getting material from pressure-sensitive manufacturers in a timely way is very important. We are not the low-cost guys. We have to find different ways to compete, so we focus on the ‘underserved’ label converters who are not well served by the big guys, perhaps because their demands are less. Big guys need volume. That strategy makes sense for them, and our strategy makes sense for us. We have to compete based on service, and delivery is one aspect of that—an important one.”
Spinnaker offers many products in its Trimless program, manufacturing 60-in.-wide master rolls of material in Troy that are shipped to the distribution centers. If a customer wants, for example, three 6-in. rolls of 5,000, that is what they get.
Location, Location, Location
Fuehrer says the Atlanta location was chosen because Spinnaker didn’t have a distribution center in the Southeast.
“We have more than 100 different constructions in that location, some of the most used ones, and we can now deliver very quickly from that location all the way down to Florida.”
In southern California, Spinnaker had been using a contract slitter. “It was a great relationship for many years,” says Fuehrer, “but we outgrew it. That’s a really important market, and we wanted to expand the number of products we could offer trimless. The market out there is a little bit different. Because the cost of real estate is so high, they don’t have a lot of room for inventory, so they really need next-day deliveries. We will offer lower volume programs on Trimless to help them meet their needs.”
The facility is in Brea, a suburb of Los Angeles, and it offers more than 125 items from in the Trimless program.
Fuehrer says both new facilities are now fully operational, augmenting three operating slitting and distributions centers located in Chicago, New York, and Troy. This mean nearly 90% of Spinnaker’s existing label converting capacity in the US will be within a one-day delivery range of a distribution point. Spinnaker plans to have open houses at both locations so customers can see for themselves what is available.
The company has received great feedback its customers, Fuehrer says proudly, summing up, “[These new facilities] match up really well with our mission.”
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