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July 2012
EDA Office of Foreign Trade • Riverside County, California • USA
is planned in the Cincinnati area to
service customers in the Midwest and
East Coast.
“It (the expansion) is good for the
company, and it’s a testament to how
we have been able to do well here,”
Smith said. ”This (Moreno Valley
facility) is still the key place for us to
access the Pacific Rim.”
As part of its expansion, the company
may be able to take advantage
of a program underway at Norco
College that seeks to ensure that all
community college students who are
interested in working in new, high-tech
distribution centers have access to a
core curriculum that prepares them for
employment.
The National Center for Supply Chain
Technology is working with several
community colleges around the
country, including institutions near
iHerb’s planned expansion, said Kevin
Fleming, Associate Dean, Career and
Technical Education, at Norco College.
“We look forward to staffing you with
supply chain technicians,” Fleming said
during a recent tour of the iHerb facility
in Moreno Valley.
Without the export business, “we
would not be looking at a second
warehouse,” Smith said. “It would
be completely different without the
international aspect of our business.”
Inside the Moreno Valley distribution
center, workers weave their way
through stacks and stacks of products
that iHerb provides to customers. A
complex system of conveyor belts
moves a seemingly endless supply of
cardboard boxes containing orders
to an area where iHerb employees
prepare the shipments for transport to
area airports.
The company is almost exclusively
an “e-tailing” operation, in which
retailing is done almost entirely
over the Internet. Except for a small
satellite store in Irwindale, there are
no storefronts, no sales staff and no
overhead costs associated with stores.
About 400 vendors provide products to
iHerb, which stocks about 30,000 SKUs
in Moreno Valley.
The expansion in the Cincinnati area
in June, 2013 will employ another
150 people and handle 47,000 SKUs
initially, with the potential to increase
to 80,000, Smith said. That expansion
is possible because of the success the
company has enjoyed in Moreno Valley,
he said.
“It’s yet another exciting phase that we
are entering into,” Smith said. “There’s
never a dull moment at iHerb.”