The Situation
Gebrüder Weiss — the oldest third-party logistics provider in the world, founded in 1823 — needed to consolidate bifurcated distribution facilities representing over 200,000 square feet of space, including a temperature-controlled component, into a single optimized location. The company had strict service level agreements with its customers governing 1-day, 2-day, and 3-day ground shipping coverage.
Finding a location that met those SLA commitments while also minimizing labor cost and real estate expense required a fundamentally different analytical approach than traditional industrial site selection. A building that's cheap to lease can be wildly expensive to operate if it adds half a day to average delivery times or sits outside the service radius of key ground hubs.
The Approach
We developed a custom national screening model built specifically around Gebrüder Weiss's service requirements. The model mapped population access within 1-, 2-, and 3-day ground shipping zones from each candidate market, overlaid the locations of FedEx and UPS ground hubs to ensure proximity to the physical network, and integrated labor availability and wage cost data within 60 minutes of each candidate hub. Real estate cost was overlaid as a final variable — so that locations were sorted by their ability to meet service requirements first, and their cost efficiency second.
The result was a ranked scorecard of candidate markets with a clear, auditable basis for recommendation — one the client team could follow and defend internally.
The client team had not been exposed to this level of data-driven real estate analysis. The approach earned multiple follow-on expansion assignments across the US and Canada — the beginning of an ongoing portfolio and transaction strategy relationship.