NorthJersey.com

Moonachie is new home for Teterboro importer

More than 20 years ago, Wendy Shen moved her business from Taiwan to Bergen County, hoping to build it up.
But when she recently considered relocating the company again, this time from Teterboro to New York or Pennsylvania, she had no trouble seeing a big down side.

Shen, whose company, Flomo, imports gifts, stationery, party goods and other items, surveyed her staff, which now numbers about 40. She found that the company would lose half its workers if it moved an hour’s drive away, and about 60 percent if it moved 90 minutes away.

That would have been too great a loss, Shen said Wednesday, at the ribbon cutting for a new 100,000-square-foot showroom and warehouse just opened in Moonachie.

The decision to stay in New Jersey rather than risk losing workers caught the attention of Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagano, New Jersey’s business development advocate, who attended the ribbon cutting. She noted that unlike the many occasions in which the state offers a sizable tax break to keep a company from leaving, Flomo got no such help, and instead Shen decided to stay because the possible loss of key employees was “not something she was willing to do.”

The opening of Flomo’s facility – of which 10 percent is office and showroom space, and the remainder is warehouse – offers another sign of the strength of the Meadowlands’ warehouse market, in large part due to the proximity of New York and the growing need for online retailers to have distribution centers from which they can quickly get goods to consumers.

In the most recent figures, for the 4th quarter of 2015, the vacancy rate for warehouse space in New Jersey was 6.4 percent, down from 8.2 percent a year earlier. Bergen County’s vacancy rate was 7.5 percent in the quarter
“It’s location, location, location,” said Jim Kirkos, president and CEO of the Meadowlands Chamber of Commerce.
Flomo was started by Shen’s father in Taiwan, in 1971, when the company made plastic pencil boxes and other items. Shen moved to the U.S. in 1992, to begin distribution here.

Flomo’s warehouse will serve retail customers nationwide, as well as in Central America and South America. The company needed to move because its lease in Teterboro had expired, Shen said, adding that the new warehouse – which includes wires embedded in the floor to guide forklift trucks – is smaller, but more efficient than the old one.
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