COTATI -- Planet One Products, Inc., which makes and sells what aficionados need to store and serve wine and increasingly beer and spirits, plans to move to a 42,000-square-foot Petaluma plant to accommodate strong sales growth and allow for more wholesale business.
Planet One companies International Wine Accessories, CellarPro Cooling Systems, Le Cache Premium Wine Cabinets and WineKeeper have been growing rapidly in the past few years and have outgrown the 19,000 square feet of production, warehouse and office space at 531 Mercantile Dr. in Cotati.
[caption id="attachment_98964" align="alignleft" width="450"] John Salvante in the Cotati plant assembles a WineKeeper preservation system for open bottles. (credit: Planet One Products)[/caption]
"As the business has grown, we have struggled to find space for inventory stocking and enough space for assembly for the CellarPro and WineKeeper businesses," said co-owner Ben Argov, 49. Planet One employs 35.
Planet One companies sales now are around $10 million a year. Growth has been around 30 percent a year for IWA, acquired from Vintage Wine Estates in January 2012, and CellarPro, which Planet One started in 2008 to build cooling systems in the freestanding Le Cache cabinets, sales of which have been growing in the single digits annually.
Big growth areas for IWA are custom wine cellars, which heats up demand for CellarPro refrigeration, and wholesale. The latter is something Planet One wanted to develop on acquiring IWA but hasn't had the ability to scale operations in the current facility, Mr. Argov said.
"We wanted to sell wine accessories to wholesale accounts like wineries and hospitality, but we did not have the space to hold all the stock to service wholesale accounts," he said.
Around the beginning of this month, Planet One owners acquired a 42,000-square-foot vacant former Cisco Systems and Sistema US building at 1445 N. McDowell Blvd. in Petaluma for $3.47 million. The company wants to relocate there in coming weeks and has applied for permits on upgrades that would help with assembly as well as unloading and loading inventory, namely, adding a dock door for two trucks.
"Now, we will be able to take in additional stock to deliver to wholesale customers on a real-time basis and can drop-ship to them," Mr. Argov said. Lack of space often prevents similar suppliers from offering drop-shipping, he added.
While order fulfillment systems in the warehouse and online are sufficiently scaled from the mostly consumer orders through IWA, staff is overhauling the catalog to prepare for the wholesale shift, Mr. Argov said. The retail catalog of 48 pages sent to consumers up to a half-dozen times a year is being doubled in size for the wholesale version, which would go out once or twice a year.
The biggest demand from wholesale accounts is glassware for wine, beer and spirits, but items for the bar and for entertaining are hot too, Mr. Argov said. But also gaining sales momentum is the WineKeeper business, particularly from restaurants and hotels that want to preserve opened bottles of wine. Acquired just over a year ago, WineKeeper makes refrigerated and room-temperature versions that pour wine from sealed bottles via a tap and inert gases.
IWA's website just received an overhaul, too, to emphasize custom wine cellars and racking. The company's designers visit clients' homes and get specifications from their contractors or from IWA's own network of installers, now serving the top 15 wine consumption markets in the U.S. and growing. Components for the custom cellars largely are dropped-shipped from manufacturers.
The cost for such tailored cellars typically starts at $10,000 because of needed refrigeration, lighting, insulation, vapor barrier and racking. Cost can range widely based on how many bottles are stored per square foot and other features such as counter space.
Buying the Petaluma building will give Planet One more than double the space for about the same monthly financing cost for the current facility, Mr. Argov said. The Cotati building likely will be sold sometime after the move.
Brian Foster and Steven Leonard of Cassidy Turley represented the seller of 1445 N. McDowell.
