Germantown-based Midwest Products Inc. has purchased a nearby industrial building for $2.9 million to accommodate the company’s continued expansion. The company, a manufacturer of embroidery products, is currently located in a 17,000-square-foot facility at W194 N11665 McCormick Drive in the Germantown Industrial Park. Its newly acquired facility, approximately 30,000 square feet, is located in the same business
Germantown-based Midwest Products Inc.has purchased a nearby industrial building for $2.9 million to accommodate the company’s continued expansion.
The company, a manufacturer of embroidery products, is currently located in a 17,000-square-foot facility at W194 N11665 McCormick Drive in the Germantown Industrial Park. Its newly acquired facility, approximately 30,000 square feet, is located in the same business park at N117 W19345 Fulton Drive.
Previously, Midwest Products had planned on building a new 52,000-square-foot headquarters in a nearby business park, but scrapped those plans when the Fulton Drive building became available.
"We had been looking for space for quite some time," said Tiffany Ament-Mack, co-owner of Midwest Products. "We even had gone to a couple of neighbors to see if they would be willing to sell their building. We were probably a week away from breaking ground when we found that the building across the street — one of many buildings we were interested in — was going to go up for sale."
Ament-Mack said that the company's first choice was not to build new, citing the company's urgent need for new space and that building new would deliver the new facility during the company's busy season.
"The primary reason we did what we did is the convenience factor," Ament-Mack said. "Building is such a stressful process no matter what and the time it takes to build a new building wasn't appealing because we needed to grow now."
Midwest Products opened in 1983 as a home embroidery company, but grew into a large embroidery company doing contract embroidery for companies such as McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Briggs & Stratton and the Olympic Games.
[caption id="attachment_592979" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Midwest Products' existing facility on McCormick Drive. Image from Google Maps[/caption]
The company has expanded twice in Germantown. Its top-selling product is The Hoopmaster, which helps prepare fabric for embroidery by stretching the material and resisting movement. The product is the number one selling commercial embroidery hooping system in the world and is used by companies like Cintas, Louis Vuitton and Tiffany & Co.
More recently, however, Midwest Products has been seeing most of its growth from home embroiderers, which also tend to give the company a more pronounced busy season.
Many home embroiderers are doing projects for things like school sports teams or other community organizations, which tend to be busier around the start of school or the holidays, according to Ament-Mack.
"Professional uniforms are needed all the time, the garment industry is always making something new so that is kind of constant, but there is now a bigger swing on the home market," Ament-Mack said. "That's because these home embroidery machines these days are more commercial-like and they allow people to do more intricate stuff. Now they're even selling on places like Etsy."
While plans are in early stages still, the company plans on using both facilities for production and storage, but it's hoping to keep bigger machinery in its existing building and then smaller assembly and shipping to the other.
The Fulton Drive facility was sold by an affiliate of Waukesha-based CGK M&A Advisors, which is an affiliate of Chortek LLP. The building was previously tenanted by Turn-Key Solutions, a manufacturer of industrial machinery.
