Efficiency expected by consolidating warehouses, says store owner/manager

LANDRUM – The Architectural Warehouse store in Landrum is consolidating with their Tryon store by the end of the year and is holding an inventory sale until the move in January 2017.

Currently, the store in Landrum is located on 110 N. Trade Ave. behind The Hare and Hound Pub. The store’s headquarters, according to owner Jim Strausbaugh, will be at their location at 151 Mercerizing Rd. in Tryon.

“I think the big news kind of is that we’re moving our headquarters there, as we’ve been there and here in Landrum for many years,” Strausbaugh explained.

Landrum store manager Pamela McCarthy added that the Architectural Warehouse has been in its location in downtown Landrum for 14 years and at the Tryon location for 10 years.

“Jim started his business across the street in a small storage unit,” McCarthy said, and Strausbaugh added he since sold the building to Matt Troyer, now owner of Foothills Amish Furniture. “It was mostly just doors and some building equipment when we moved here.”

The move across the street, according to Strausbaugh, was before the stock market crash of 2008 and he said the business was phenomenal. Afterwards, Strausbaugh said the business went in the tank, dropping 80 percent.

“We’ve been thinking there was a big recovery coming, but there has been a very anemic recovery if there’s been one at all,” Strausbaugh said. “We tried to accommodate, thinking the recovery would be like most recoveries have been in this country in maybe two or three years. We were hoping against hope that something would happen but it never has.”

McCarthy said this led to the change in the way Strausbaugh handled his business from selling building supplies, to antiques and collectibles because she said people stopped building in the area. Strausbaugh added that consolidating “just made sense” as they were sending customers back and forth between their Tryon and Landrum locations.

“We’re still muscling along and doing fine, thank you very much, but it just made sense because we are sending people from here to the other store, from that store to this store,” Strausbaugh said. “We may have some doors there that we don’t have here, and so we’ll have people running from place to place trying to figure out what they are going to do. We just came to the conclusion that we need to consolidate the two stores.”

Moving the headquarters will require moving the inventory of the Landrum store to Tryon, and Strausbaugh said a two-month sale is underway in preparation of the move.

“The sale is going to reduce the amount of inventory we have to move, but we have over three times the amount of space we have down there,” Strausbaugh said. “That space is big, it’s a huge space, and we can actually accommodate all of our inventory there right this minute. It’s a sadness that we leave Landrum, but it’s just an economic thing.”

McCarthy added that a positive thing is coming out the consolidation, in that all of the Landrum employees will be moving to the Tryon headquarters, rather than losing their jobs.