Guitar distributor finds Goodlettsville instrumental
Nashville Business Journal - by Richard Lawson
Goodlettsville residents soon will hear the twang of tightly strung guitar strings as it becomes a hub for a major six-string distributor.
Bloomfield, Conn.-based Kaman Music Corp. has leased 70,000 square feet of a 100,000-square-foot building in the Northfork Industrial Park being developed by Memphis-based Weston Cos. Kaman will expand into all of the space in a year.
The guitar maker is consolidating two distribution centers in Chicago and Atlanta into Northfork, located north of Nashville.
Though it looked at Memphis and Louisville, neither has a music industry as dominant as Nashville's.
"That was one of the big drivers in choosing Nashville," says Robert Crescitelli, Kaman's vice president of operations.
The area also is a central location that helps better serve its customers in the Midwest and Southeast as well as reduce the company's operating costs.
In coming to the Nashville area, it will fill a building that was completed last October and is the first tenant for the park since the announcement of Schurman Fine Papers.
Weston built a 134,000-square-foot building for the San Francisco area greeting card company last year. It is now gearing up to begin shipping products from there in March.
The music instrument distributor is a subsidiary of Kaman Corp., which got its start in 1945 developing helicopter technology for military and commercial uses.
Most notably, the Navy flew the Kaman-built SH-2 Seasprite for search and rescue missions and is still in the Navy Reserves and other militaries around the world.
In the mid-1960s, company founder Charles Kaman developed the Ovation guitar, which has a round back, using technology gleaned from building helicopters.
In addition to the Ovation, Kaman also distributes Takamine acoustic and acoustic electric guitars, Hamer electric guitars and Gibraltar and Toca percussion instruments and hardware.
Country music star Glen Campbell plays Ovation guitars as do many other country stars. Rock musicians such as Jeff Ament with Pearl Jam use Kaman-distributed guitars.
Kaman looked at eight alternatives in the Nashville area, eventually narrowing the list to two, according to Martin Meyer, a broker with the Nashville office of St. Louis-based Colliers Turley Martin Smith & Co.
Meyer represented Kaman along with Colliers broker Bob Calton. Rusty Longhurst was the marketing representative for Weston.
The final choices were Northfork and Three Oaks Industrial Park in LaVergne, south of Nashville. Both are new industrial developments.
Three Oaks is being developed by PruCrow Industrial Properties L.P., a joint venture between Parsippany, N.J.-based Prudential Real Estate Investors and Dallas-based Crow Investment Trust. Trammell Crow Co. in Brentwood is responsible for leasing the space.
"We were looking for a stand-alone building," Crescitelli says.
With Three Oaks, Kaman would have shared a building with Nokian Tyre North America Ltd. Nokian is moving its specialty tire distribution from Toronto into 34,000 square feet of a 143,000-square-foot building.
Even though Weston developed its building as speculative space, it verges on being a build-to-suit structure in which a building is designed and built to a user's specifications.
Latest News |
Most Viewed Stories |
Most Emailed Stories |
