PORTLAND, Oregon – The Joinery is moving its southeast Portland woodshop and showroom to a larger shop in North Portland in the St. Johns neighborhood.

Cassandra Jackson, brand manager, said that CEO Jon Blumenauer went about planning this possible move by getting employees involved early in the planning stages.

“We started the planning stages originally by getting our team together and talking through the bottlenecks of our current space and a wish list for the new space,” Jackson said. “Once that was determined our CEO did an amazing job finding a building that checked off all our boxes for the wish list.”

Now they are working through a chart of all the major points to moving the operation, including:

Decisions on machinery that they will continue to use or update during move (such as dust collection); Quotes for machinery moves; and scheduling downtime for shop movement both on the sales lead time side of things and with employee planning for commute and possible shift changes

“The fun exciting part is the opportunity to adjust our workflow and layout of the shop,” Jackson said. “With twice as much space and more doors, our team has the ability to really dig into our current workflow and see how we can adjust things to make it a better work environment for all our team builders and finishers.

“We are working a bit with OMEP and our team leaders to evaluate our top sellers and to do shop flow for those key items and to adjust our shop layout to plan for that and future growth.”

What are the primary challenges?

“Just the shear mass of pieces to this puzzle are a challenge,” Jackson said. “So planning now allows us to hopefully minimize the holdups in the future. Budgeting for this move is also difficult.

“Buying your own building is already a huge financial commitment, but moving a manufacturing space, showroom, all office/admin and IT servers can be a complex move that can be costly. So working thru all the quotes and plans to ensure we are strategically making decisions is important.

“A change of location also means that we may lose some employees as it is just not feasible for them to change their commute. We have worked hard to evaluate the best location but because our team lives all over the Pacific Northwest and not just within Portland Metro, there is no solution that fit all our needs.

"Our CEO and shop foreman have been doing an amazing job connecting with all employees to understand any concerns or worries about moving to a new space. This included a company bus trip through St. Johns including understanding different commuting options along with understanding this new neighborhood and where some of the best coffee, beer, and grocery store were.”

Jackson said The Joinery shared a blog post with their community, partners, and customers that shares a bit of this. https://www.thejoinery.com/blog/st-johns-here-we-come