By: Audrey Laforest, Plastics News

April 11, 2019

Custom injection molder Steinwall Inc. has doubled its warehouse capacity with the $8.3 million purchase of a 145,500-square-foot building in Coon Rapids, Minn.

 

The new warehouse, about a mile from its main production facility and headquarters in Coon Rapids, replaces a roughly 75,000-square-foot warehouse in Brooklyn Park, Minn. The company sold that building for around $4.5 million, according to Vice President of Operations Tom Smolenski.

 

“It has plenty of space for us to grow into,” Smolenski said in an April 11 phone interview.

 

The larger building has 30 dock doors compared with the previous warehouse, which only had three. This allows Steinwall to improve operational flow and layout, stage finished goods more efficiently and improve turnaround time for trucks, the company said.

 

The Coon Rapids warehouse will be used primarily for storing finished goods and raw materials, but will also house secondary operations such as hot stamping and assembly. Around 30 employees — five in distribution and 25 in secondary operations — will work out of the building.

 

In total, the new warehouse brings Steinwall’s facility capacity to 246,100 square feet. This includes the company’s 100,600-square-foot main production site and headquarters.

 

The additional space also allows the company to purchase more equipment in the future. Steinwall currently has 55 injection molding machines with clamping forces ranging from 30-1,750 tons. The presses include horizontal, vertical and two-shot molding varieties.

Steinwall makes parts for a wide range of end markets, including agriculture, automotive, lawn and garden, appliances, computers, consumer goods, recreation and packaging, among others.

 

“All of the markets that we serve have been doing very well,” Smolenski said. “I think over the past 12 months we’ve manufactured 1,000 different parts.”

 

Steinwall employs around 185 and is No. 230 on Plastics News’ most recent annual ranking of North American injection molders. The company generated $22.5 million in sales in 2017.

 

Smolenski said sales for fiscal 2018, ending Oct. 31 for the company, were $27 million. He estimated growth for the company this year should be around 5-7 percent.

 

“Last year, we grew 20 percent, which is just crazy, so that caused a little bit of chaos,” Smolenski said.

 

All of the company’s customers were strong last year, he added, with customers ordering 15-20 percent more, mostly for existing parts.

 

“We didn’t have a ton of new tools,” he said. “It was a lot of existing business, a lot of existing work, that just had really strong demand.”