Schäfer Travel Retail has signaled its intentions to expand its store footprint across the world after buying land and securing planning permission to build a new 8,000 square meter distribution center in Germany.
The property will be sited at Willroth Business Park, neighboring a major Haribo warehouse, adjacent to the A3, one of Germany’s main arterial roads. The location – which will also include offices to headquarter the Schäfer business – lies about an hour from Frankfurt Airport and just 30 minutes from Cologne and Bonn airports.
The planned specification for the building will ensure strong green credentials with provision for the use of renewable energy, and, when appropriate, Schäfer said it will apply for German sustainable building certification, which places equal emphasis on the environment, people and commercial viability. Further, the distribution center is being built on a brownfield site, which was a former slate mine.
Schäfer Travel Retail – which operates consumer electronics stores under the brand Move at a number of key German airports – said the distribution center project is expected to be fully complete by the end of 2022.
“Some people might say this is not the right time to make such a bold move to build an ambitious distribution centre, but we believe the opposite,” said John Woodhouse, managing partner of Schäfer Airport Retail. “We firmly believe in a strong future for travel retail, despite the painful current difficulties for the channel brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The timing for the completion of our project should mirror the start of meaningful recovery and gives us a strong platform from which to achieve our ambitions for scaling the business and making acquisitions to support expansion.”
He added, “The new building is an important long-term strategic move for us towards achieving a more efficient distribution operation, which we will need to continue the growth of the business. Our ambitions stretch way beyond the German market and we believe this project will lay the foundations for us to move into multiple overseas markets, as well as into airport retail in other European countries.”
