A commercial playground manufacturer recently leased about 70,000 square feet of industrial space in Navassa for a distribution center that will serve the East Coast and Midwest.

Shanghai-headquartered Wisdom Playgrounds started out leasing about 13,000 square feet of space along U.S. 421 four years ago but realized the company needed more room to grow, said Kim Haemker, Wisdom Playgrounds’ chief operations officer.

This spring, the company signed a lease for roughly 40,000 square feet at a 200,000-square-foot industrial building erected by Samet Corp. at 1335 Cedar Hill Road in Navassa. That lease has since grown to nearly 70,000 square feet, Haemker said, as the company evaluated its space needs.

“It was a very fast-moving project, and they had a very quick-hitting need for space,” said Brian Hall, Samet’s Corp.’s president of real estate, “which is exactly what our building was designed for, to be able to accommodate tenants, users, industrial companies that need Class A space quickly.”

In addition to Wisdom Playgrounds, the building’s tenants include Superior Mechanical and Johnson’s Modern Electric, Hall said. Approximately 90,000 square feet are unoccupied.

Wisdom Playgrounds has a presence in 27 countries and is one of a handful of commercial playground manufacturers in the U.S. market, according to Haemker. The company provides equipment for customers ranging from schools and municipalities to daycare centers. Wisdom Playgrounds makes playground component pieces like swings, slides and spring riders in Germany, Taiwan and Shanghai, she said, before shipping them to distribution centers like the one in Navassa. (A playground set from Wisdom Playgrounds is pictured below.)

The facility primarily serves the company’s “quick ship business model,” Haemker said. While some companies ship playground components as part of a kit, Wisdom Playgrounds allows customers to customize their playground sets by choosing from a set of stock components.

The model has allowed the company to serve customers who might want to customize their playground set-up to some extent but don’t have time to spend weeks customizing and waiting for the product to ship.

“They’re looking for that hybrid,” Haemker said, “and that’s really where we’ve sat in the marketplace.”

The company’s pre-designed or custom-designed sets can ship in three business days. Wisdom Playgrounds also has a distribution center in Texas that serves customers on the West Coast and is looking to establish a third distribution location, Haemker said.

The company chose the Wilmington area as a distribution hub because of the nearby port and its central and strategic location.

“The majority of our domestic distribution is on the East Coast, so we were trying to find a centralized hub that made the most sense for North and South,” Haemker said.

The company is installing temporary product racks while waiting for permanent racks at the Navassa facility, where employees pull playground components together and prepare the sets for delivery.

Wisdom Playgrounds employs 13 people in the distribution center and four administrative staff, according to Haemker. During peak season, the company expects to employ about 25 people on the floor.

Haemker said the company aims to finish upfitting the distribution center in the next 90 days and eventually plans to establish an on-site showroom.

“We finally have a home that we can have distributors come to,” she said. “Before, we didn’t have the ability; we didn’t have the space.”

Samet Corp. has plans to build two additional industrial buildings on the Navassa site, including a 150,000-square-foot building that’s in the design phase, Hall said. Wisdom Playgrounds is eyeing the potential for more growth, too.

“There’s a high possibility we will probably end up being about double this,” Haemker said. “We’ll be in about 150,000 (square feet) when it’s all said and done.”