Famous Footwear Completes 350,000-SF Warehouse

LEBEC, CA-Publicly held Brown Shoe Co. has completed a new 350,000-square-foot West Coast distribution center for its Famous Footwear brand at the 1,450-acre Tejon Industrial Complex that will serve approximately one-third of the Famous Footwear chain’s 1,100 locations. The company says that the new distribution center, with an annual capacity of 32 million pairs of shoes and expected inventory turns 17 to 22 times per year, will save time and costs in shipping shoes to an initial distribution area including all Famous Footwear stores located west of the Rocky Mountains.

According to Brown Shoe chairman and CEO Ron Fromm, the new 350,000-square-foot facility will enable the company’s stores and web sites to offer seasonal footwear trends earlier in the season, and to “freshen assortments more frequently.” He adds that the Tejon Ranch location in California’s Central Valley provides logistics, labor and transportation efficiencies.

The Famous Footwear distribution center employs about 75 workers and is expected to create approximately 40 additional jobs in upcoming months. Its initial shipping area will expand later this month to include direct shipping to customers in that geographic area who place orders on FamousFootwear.com.

Brown Shoe partnered with supply chain strategy, design and implementation firm Fortna Inc. on the new distribution center, which features new technologies and systems as well as new warehouse management software and the Fortna warehouse control system, called FortnaWCS.

Clayco Inc., a corporate real estate design-build and construction firm headquartered in St. Louis, acquired the 23.75-acre lot in Tejon Industrial Complex upon which the Famous Footwear warehouse was built and leases the building to Brown Shoe. Clayco selected the location to fulfill Famous Footwear’s distribution center requirements after a review of potential sites in California and surrounding states.

The Tejon Industrial Complex at the junction of Interstate 5 and Highway 99, is part of the 270,000-acre Tejon Ranch, the largest contiguous expanse of private land in California. The 270,000-acre ranch is the principal asset of Tejon Ranch Co., which is a diversified real estate development and agribusiness company.