A major Niles distribution warehouse for a series of nationally branded clothing companies will apparently fall victim to corporate consolidation this summer, and be gone by fall, wiping out 92 jobs in southern Berrien County. Broder Brothers Company which owns Alphabroder, a national apparel retailer, has posted a WARN filing, indicating intent to close down operations at the Niles Distribution Center on W. Chicago Road by the end of September.
In accordance with the Worker Adjustment Retraining & Notification Act (the WARN Act), the Pennsylvania-based firm has notified staff and management at the Bodek & Rhodes facility at 2121 W. Chicago Road that all positions are to be terminated when the facility is closed by September 30, 2016. Layoffs are expected to begin on August 1st, with three full-time staff members and 89 part-time, temporary workers slated to lose their jobs in the consolidation.
Alphabroder is a Top 40 retail clothing supplier nationwide. Late last year Alphabroder acquired another Top 40 supplier in the form of Bodek & Rhodes, which had maintained a major warehouse and shipping center for the Midwest in Niles dating back some 17 years to early 1999.
In early December, CEO Mike Rhodes at Bodek & Rhodes and Norm Hullinger the CEO at Alphabroder were jointly interviewed by the ad specialty industry magazine Promogram regarding the merger and they jointly noted that the deal "was entirely driven from a customer perspective," suggesting they would be able to "offer more product choices, deeper inventory, and even higher levels of service."
The resulting consolidation has already eliminted at least one other Bodek & Rhodes warehouse in Massachussets where the facility at Norton was folded into the Alphabroder facility at Middleboro one month ago.
Bodek & Rhodes has five national warehouses including the operations in Niles and Middleboro. The others are in Philadelphia, Fresno, and Orlando. Collectively they have nearly 1.25-million square feet of inventory and more than 1,500 styles in the more than 40 brands in their stable including such household names as Fruit of the Loom, Champion, Adidas Golf, Dickies, Jerzees, and American Apparel.
Alphabroder has grown exponentially over the past three years acquiring Imprints Wholesale in 2012 and Ash City Worldwide in 2014. The company was founded in 1919 and is North America's largest distributor of trade, private label and retail apparel brands and merchandise to the promotional products marketplace. The company reported North American ad specialty sales of $815-million in 2014.
Bodek & Rhodes was founded in 1939 and was a family-owned wholesaler whose clients included embroiderers, screen printers, promotional product distributors and uniform companies. They reported North American ad specialty sales in 2014 of $254.1-million, an 8-percent increase from the previous year. The Niles distribution center was first incorporated in February of 1999, and had operated out of the Niles Distribution Center, which is also home to Pilkington and several other firms, from the beginning.
The nearest Alphabroder distribution center is in suburban Chicago at Bollingbrook, Illinois. There was no immediate word if the Niles facility inventory will be re-routed to Bollingbrook or if there are other plans at this time.
