Point S adds Oregon tire warehouse

PORTLAND, Ore. — It won't be long before Point S Tire & Auto Service USA has a seventh warehouse in place to service its growing affiliate network in central and eastern Oregon and Washington.

The marketing cooperative is leasing a 50,000-sq.-ft. warehouse under construction in Umatilla, Ore., a community of about 5,000 residents in northeast Oregon on the Columbia River. The warehouse will serve the Tri-Cities area of Washington: Kennewick, Pasco and Richland.

The building is expected to be ready by early in the third quarter, according to Point S CEO Walter Lybeck.

"It will help us with supply in central Washington, in particular, making sure we have product in place," Lybeck told Tire Business.

The warehouse predominantly will carry heavy agricultural and off-road products, "helping us to support the central Washington area."

Point S also operates two warehouses in the Portland area and one each in Memphis, Denver, Salt Lake City and Albany, Ore.

Lybeck said the group needs additional warehousing capacity in Memphis. The existing warehouse there — actually there are three buildings but Point S considers it one entity — services around 20 of the 257 Point S locations in the U.S.

"That is a primary concern for us," Lybeck said of the situation in Memphis. "We need to fill in a few of the market areas."

The Memphis warehouse — part of Point S' 2019 purchase of Nussbaum Distributing Inc. — services customers within a 175-mile radius. The group will continue to look for an expansion opportunity there, once the timing is right.

Part of the reason Point S has outgrown its Memphis warehouse is the mix of products sold in the region. The warehouse formerly stored passenger and light truck tires, but today it stocks larger-diameter ag and OTR products that many Point S dealers sell.

Secondly, business is booming for Point S, particularly in the Memphis region. In fact, the marketing cooperative recently said it has doubled in size based on revenue over the last five years, buoyed by a 24% increase in sales in 2021, and the wholesale business is a significant portion of that.

"We've got really good people in the field working for us at the end of the day," Point S COO Clint Young said. "The leadership team, and board, has made a commitment to that market.

"Although (the Memphis warehouse) is not sufficient now, they set us up with a good building a block down there to get started. ... (The success) is all a result of support we gave that market, and the team that is working there."

Lybeck said the group decided to invest resources into ramping up the Umatilla warehouse over the next few years, while focusing "on rebalancing our current distribution to make sure we have current warehousing structure in our current markets, obviously looking at opportunities as they arise."

The priority, he said, remains the same.

"Our strategy is to really focus on product, place and time to ensure our members have product in competitive and timely fashion but also an affordable fashion," Lybeck said. "We can only invest so much, so we're taking it one piece at a time."