A New Albany industrial park geared for small manufacturers has become attractive to companies unwilling to build standalone production plants.
Columbus developer Pizzuti Cos. has less than 30 percent of its 304,000-square-foot manufacturing building available just months after the first companies began occupying the space in the New Albany Business Park’s Personal Care and Beauty Innovation Campus. Contract manufacturer Alene Candles LLC is moving into 100,000 square feet of the building, and Jeyes Group Ltd., a British producer of home fragrances, will take 56,900 square feet of the building that was erected without tenants signed to fill it.

Specialty packaging producer Arminak & Associates in June received a state tax credit in return for its pledge to take 56,900 square feet at the Pizzuti complex. The company intends to make product dispenser pumps for Limited Brands Inc. and others.

Pizzuti Executive Vice President Jim Miller hopes to lease the remaining 87,000 square feet to a single company.

“We’ve leased up quickly given that we just made the (building) shell available in May,” he said. “Manufacturing is up in the U.S.”

The building marked Pizzuti’s second project at the campus. It earlier developed a 500,000-square-foot plant that was built for contract packager Accel Inc.

Miller said the developer has changed how it designs buildings to include larger parking lots to accommodate bigger staffs instead of tractor trailers. It also has revised building dimensions so they are more suitable for production.

“We refined our (distribution center) concept … to accommodate manufacturing and light manufacturing,” he said.

Matching the clients
New Albany Business Park has attracted companies with supply ties to retail chains under the Limited Brands umbrella, such as Bath & Body Works . Vee Pak Inc., an Illinois-based maker of product labels and packaging, opened a 105,000-square-foot plant this year. Meanwhile, Anomatic Corp., a maker of metal-coated packaging, opened a 83,000-square-foot production and design operation in June.

But Jennifer Chrysler, New Albany director of community development, said not all manufacturers in the industry that have contacted the city have the financial capacity or desire to have their own facility. She said some require less than the 100,000 to 500,000 square feet that many other vendors and suppliers have built.

She said a site-selection representative – later revealed as Arminak’s agent – had contacted the city at the time Jeyes and Alene were considering their options.

“It seemed like it would be a good fit to match up a speculative (multitenant) facility with those companies,” Chrysler said, “With Pizzuti’s vision and (park developer) New Albany Co.’s vision, we’ve been able to meet the needs of some companies who we might otherwise not have been able to accommodate.

“We continue to field calls – perhaps one every week – from somebody who is interested,” she said. “It seems, right now, the marketing activity suggests there’s a need for another facility.”

Miller said the stream of leasing has prompted interest from prospective corporate tenants and developers.
“This building is representative of the energy that’s been created up there,” he said. “We get a lot of questions about the park from outside of Columbus.”

Miller said the developer could decide this year whether to build a second multitenant complex.

“We’re assessing the velocity of the market right now,” he said. “We’re enthusiastic for manufacturing, in the right market.”

Brian R. Ball covers real estate, allied construction industries, development and the hospitality and hotel sectors for Business First.

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A single multinational client will help double sales for the maker of school-scheduling software in New Albany’s business incubator,Inc@8000.

Capture Education Inc. signed a distribution deal on June 19 with the School Systems group of Pearson Education Inc. to offer Capture’s scheduling software as a module in Pearson’s larger electronic system school districts use to manage student information including attendance, behavior and grades.

That instantly exposes the product, ScheduleSmart to Pearson’s customer base encompassing 10 million students, said Mike Neubig, president and founder of Capture Education. ScheduleSmart now is being used by 13 school districts with 130,000 students.

Pearson is an international educational publishing and technology company.

Meanwhile, Neubig can continue marketing his product independently with the Pearson seal of approval. Revenue is projected at $1.2 million this year, he said, which is more than double the $550,000 in 2011.

A former school guidance counselor in Westerville, Neubig slogged through any number of student schedules before arriving at a classic entrepreneurial a-ha moment.

“I thought there’s got to be a better way than what I call the dartboard method,” he said.

He founded the company as a consulting firm in 2006 and debuted the software product in 2010.

ScheduleSmart takes in data on individual student performance and recommends a plan for courses to take leading to graduation. It then gathers up those profiles into a recommended master class schedule for the school year, cutting time and error out of the process.

“It’s monitoring data on them and even trying to match with teachers who perform best in that (curricular) pathway,” Neubig said.

With one software developer on staff, he’ll need to hire another to write code to integrate with the system from Pearson Education, a division of UK-based publisher Pearson plc (NYSE: PSO).

In a recent interview with Columbus Business First, Ohio TechAngel Funds founder John Huston said what sets successful startups apart from others is the ability to land strategic marquee customers.

Carrie Ghose covers health care and medicine, higher education, technology and business services for Business First.

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Discover Financial Services will add a $76 million data center and create 162 permanent new jobs at its campus in New Albany, the company announced today.

Carlos Minetti, an executive vice president with Discover, made the announcement at the company’s existing field operations center in central Ohio.

View the full article at The Columbus Dispatch.

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From the Newark Advocate

The business development, to many Licking Countians, appears as some distant, nondescript buildings visible from Ohio 161, north of the Beech Road interchange.

The growing New Albany Personal Care and Beauty Campus might not yet make a striking visual appearance, but it must look beautiful to job-seekers, economic development experts and the eight companies in operation or soon to be up and running in new facilities.

Three companies have started production in the Licking County campus that is part of the massive New Albany Business Park, located mostly in Franklin County.

The eight companies eventually will employ almost 1,500 workers and will occupy more than 1.4 million square feet of new manufacturing space.
Joe Devine, area manufacturing manager for Sonoco, a global packaging company based in Hartsville, S.C., said The Limited wanted its suppliers in one industrial park.

“We’ve done business with The Limited a number of years,” Devine said. “This was an opportunity to cement the relationship and grow the business, and we’re lucky to be chosen.

“Opportunities come and go, and when you can quickly jump on an opportunity before they disappear, the better off you are.”

Bringing all companies in a supply chain to one location improves the speed in getting products to market, Devine said.

Ted M. Goldberg, vice president of business development for Alene Candles, said job grants and credits were among the reasons the company chose to come to New Albany.

“There were a number of factors leading to our decision,” Goldberg said. “We have a large facility in New Hampshire we’re completely committed to, and enlarged the facility. And we still need additional space. We needed a plan to expand our operation in the Midwest, more centrally located.”
Alene Candles, a contract manufacturer of custom-designed, fragranced candles for the gift, cosmetic and retail markets, makes products for all divisions of The Limited, but primarily Bath and Body Works, Goldberg said.

Jerry Newton, director of the Licking County Planning Commission, said such a planned business development was common 30 or 40 years ago, but not so much in recent years.

“Business and industry have not been doing this amount of co-location we’re seeing at that location,” Newton said. “It signals the change of business, in how business is going to be occurring in light of all the globalization.”

New Albany has capitalized on the decisions of many companies to end their China experiment and come back to America, Newton said.

“It’s wonderful to hear of any business coming in,” Newton said. “These are the types of business and development, as a county, we’re happy to be involved in.”

Newton said improvements might be needed to Beech Road north of Ohio 161, especially to the dogleg on Beech Road, north of Smith’s Mill Road nearing Jug Street.

“We need to continue with a very positive business attitude and make sure the infrastructure keeps pace,” Newton said. “The township trustees and the city (of New Albany) are getting together and talking about doing things together they weren’t doing before.”

Although Ohio has an unemployment rate of 7.6 percent, filling some of the highly skilled positions can still be difficult, said Windy Murphy, job specialist with the Licking County Department of Job and Family Services.

“The jobs have definitely picked up, but there are still positions that go unfilled because they’re looking for a specific skill set,” Murphy said.

Murphy said the department has prescreened more than 400 applicants for Sonoco, which is hiring mechanics, operators and quality control workers.

“With the overall economy, you’d think the labor pool would be pretty deep, but we’re looking for a certain skill set, so we’re being pretty selective at this time,” Devine said.

Murphy encourages Licking Countians to apply for the positions and not fear the commute, which is only about 20 minutes from Newark.
“People will bring up that ‘I don’t want to drive that far,'” Murphy said. “It’s not that far of a drive. People tend to think it’s 45 minutes to an hour to get there.”

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From The Columbus Dispatch

It’s a manufacturing idea that dates to the early days of the automobile industry in Detroit and is one of the reasons China supplies the world with iPhones and Barbie dolls.

And now, this concept of locating all the links of the supply chain within shouting distance of the final assembler has found a 1.4 million-square-foot home in New Albany at the new Personal Care, Health and Beauty Park.

Light-manufacturing companies there have begun to churn out and package beauty and health-care products for nearby Limited Brands and other companies across the country. Estimates say the park and its companies will create 1,500 full-time jobs and hundreds more part-time positions.

“We have eight great companies here willing to work together and bring business back to the United States,” said David Abraham, co-CEO of Accel, the park’s final assembler.

The companies that have set up shop at the beauty park have headquarters throughout the United States, as well as Canada and England. They will now produce candles, shower gels and soaps, cosmetics and toiletries, air fresheners and a wide variety of packaging in their new New Albany digs.

“The idea for the park comes from Asia,” said Joel Pizzuti of Pizzuti Cos., a local developer that built three of the park’s seven buildings. “You can do it all in one location and cut costs and improve the speed to market.”

Then again, the idea might have a closer origin.

“As a result of Honda going to Marysville, all their suppliers came together there,” said Bill Ebbing, president of the New Albany Co., the developer of the beauty park. “That’s how the auto industry does it.”

The products manufactured at the new park are packaged in Accel’s massive, 510,000-square-foot building, which is a hive of activity. On a busy day, there are as many as 800 workers staffing 40 or 50 assembly lines.

They work 9 1/2-hour shifts, four days a week, with two half-hour breaks — and are paid a minimum of $8.25 an hour.

“I don’t know of any other business park in the United States that has this supply chain and manufacturing and innovation, this cluster development, all in one place,” said Jennifer Chrysler, New Albany’s director of development.

Here’s how it works:

“Let’s take a bottle of body wash for Bath and Body Works,” said Bill Rusch, a senior adviser at Anomatic Corp., a Newark-based company that produces anodized, or hard, corrosion-resistant, aluminum products. It has a 75,000-square-foot operation in the park.

The molded plastic bottles are produced at the park by two of the park’s companies, Sonoco and Axium, he said, noting that both previously made them in Canada and shipped them to the companies that filled the bottles.

“There are two companies here — KDC and Vee Pak — that make and blend the bath products that go in the bottles,” Rusch said, adding these products were formerly manufactured in Canada and Illinois, “and now they’ll be made here.”

Anomatic makes the aluminum cap that goes on top of the bottle — and the completed product is sent to Accel for packaging.

“We used to have trailer loads of product going back and forth across the country, and now we send it across the street,” Rusch said. “The whole concept is leaner manufacturing.”

And this, Rusch and Abraham say, allows the companies in the park to be competitive with their offshore competitors, even those in China, and get products from the design phase to the market faster.

Accel, Vee Pak and Anomatic have begun operations in the park, while the other five companies are scheduled to begin manufacturing this summer.

The park is a collaboration among the eight companies, the village of New Albany and the New Albany Co., which was founded by Leslie H. Wexner, who is also the chief executive of Limited Brands.

The beauty park is part of the larger 6,000-acre business park created by the New Albany Co. This new campus occupies 200 acres at the intersection of Beech and Smith’s Mill roads, just north of Rt. 161.

“We tried to find a common thread and figure out how we can make business better for everyone and clusters that allow companies to be more responsive and productive work,” Ebbing said.

New Albany helped lure these companies with 100 percent property-tax abatements for seven to 15 years. The length depends on the expected payroll generated by a company; the more they generate, the longer the abatement.

The new park will create $725,000 a year in additional income tax for New Albany, Chrysler said.

“We were running out of capacity in Newark,” Rusch said. “We looked all over Ohio and in northern Kentucky and Mexico and felt the beauty park offered the greatest opportunity.”

To qualify for the property-tax abatement, a building must meet the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environment Design.

Pizzuti built the buildings for Accel, Axium and a multi-tenant structure that houses Jeyes and Alene Candles and has room for a third tenant.

“On the front end, it starts with the way we source and treat and recycle materials,” Joel Pizzuti said. “And the buildings contain high-efficiency heating and air-conditioning systems.”

The lighting systems are also more efficient and employ motion sensors to further reduce electricity use.

All of these energy-saving systems are in place at Accel, which 17 years ago began business in a 1,200-square-foot building.

“I don’t think about all that we’ve accomplished and how far we’ve come,” Abraham said. “I think about what’s next and how we can do things better.”

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Central Ohio newest startups, non-profits, corporations, educational and healthcare institutions recently celebrated the region’s many claims to innovation at the 2011 Innovation Awards ceremony where 13 individuals and organizations were honored.

“I challenge you to always stay curious,” said Limited Brands Founder and Chair, Les Wexner in his keynote address. “Be both personally curious and curious in your organization. Keep tabs on what’s going on in the world. Look at things with fresh, youthful eyes and constantly ask yourself ‘What did I learn from that?’”

Wexner also encouraged innovators to never repeat what they had done yesterday, citing his own organization’s shift from women’s apparel to the lingerie and home and beauty categories. “It’s important to migrate your basic skills,” said Wexner, a New Albany resident and CEO of the New Albany Company, “but when you’ve done something the same way for a while, you must embrace change.”

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New Albany Business Park’s record growth in business development, despite the recent economic downturn, has captured the attention of the business media in central Ohio, prompting feature articles in The Columbus Dispatch and Columbus CEO magazine.

The Columbus Dispatch attributes New Albany’s success to its “status as a magnet for corporate expansion, partly a result of quality of life, strong infrastructure and good schools.”

Columbus CEO touts the more than 3,000 jobs and 20 businesses that have staked claim to a piece of the one-of-a-kind, corporate business park that features four innovation campuses representing distinct clusters of commerce, including beauty and personal care, healthcare, retail and research and development.

Among the other characteristics driving growth in New Albany are master planning that protects business investment for the long term and a state-of-the-art infrastructure that includes dual feed electric capabilities and a lit fiber-optic network that provides access to more than 180,000 service providers nationwide.

Beyond the bricks and mortar, New Albany’s high level of business connectivity is creating the kind of environment that fueled the growth of Silicon Valley and the Research Triangle. “It’s a very collaborative, networking environment here,” says Tammy R. Troilo-Krings, CEO and Founder of TS24, an international provider of travel management services that is located at Water’s Edge, a corporate office campus within the business park.

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It’s been less than a year since The New Albany Company and City of New Albany announced plans to create a Beauty and Personal Care Innovation Campus within the New Albany Business Park, yet the effort has already attracted some of the industry’s leading national and international companies.

The appeal of a highly-integrated supply chain hub designed to support companies within the beauty and personal care industry that can benefit from complementary capabilities, common supply chain contractors and creative synergies has led five companies, four of which were lured from outside Ohio, to develop facilities in the park. In sheer scale, the commitment of companies to the campus makes it one of the fastest growing clusters in the region with a total of 1,170 jobs created and more than 1.2 million square feet of space under development.

Among the attractions, the Innovation Campus features a highly-accessible location, adapted vehicular circulation patterns and sustainable building standards. The companies that have committed to the Innovation Campus represent a diverse range of interests from packaging and fulfillment to product manufacturing.

Accel Inc, accel-inc.com, currently based in Lewis Center, Ohio, provides fulfillment, contract packaging and distribution services, including kit assembly, gift wrapping, labeling, shrink wrapping and quality sort operation. Its service capabilities span the globe and its clients include major retailers such as Limited Brands and Bath & Body Works. The company plans a $20 million, 417,000-square-foot facility projected to employ more than 200 workers.

Alene Candles, www.alene.com, from Milford, New Hampshire, a full-service contract and private-label manufacturer of custom-designed, filled candles and home fragrance products, is a pioneer in cutting-edge wax blends that feature the latest in wax technologies such as UV inhibitors and antioxidants. The company which operates specially-designed burn test labs that can test up to 1,500 candles per day plans to build new research and laboratory facilities that encompass 300,000 square feet and will eventually employ 130 people.

Axium Plastics, www.axiumplastics.com, from Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, manufactures plastic containers using a production platform featuring the latest extrusion blow molding and injection blow molding technologies. With plans to build a new 110,000-square-foot facility, the company will expand their manufacturing and research and development operations and create 165 new jobs.

The Knowlton Development Corp., www.kdc-companies.com, based in Quebec will be opening a $55 million, 250,000-square-foot manufacturing plant on the campus in 2012 that will ultimately employ 250. A solutions provider for Fortune 500 personal care companies, Knowlton manufactures shower gels, soaps, skin lotions and other cosmetics and toiletries. Knowlton has spearheaded single-dose, butterfly packaging as well as all-natural, petroleum-free deodorant platforms.

Vee Pak, a subsidiary of Countryside, Ill.-based Vee Pak Inc., www.veepak.com, plans to build a 105,000-square-foot plant utilizing state-of-the-art technology to create labels. The facility will employ 120 workers. In addition to printing product labels, Vee Pak develops and manufactures personal care products, including shampoos, lotions, soaps and antibacterial products and provides package and filling services.

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Local officials are excited to welcome Bob Evans Farms to New Albany. The company announced last week its intention of moving its headquarters to New Albany from the south side of Columbus sometime in the next two years.

Read the full article at This Week News.

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Daimler Group is confident enough in New Albany’s prospects that it’s building a second speculative office building there. Economic development momentum in New Albany has Daimler Group Inc. and its partners putting shovels in the ground for another speculative office building in the village.

Read the full article at Columbus Business First.

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