Ukrop’s Dress Express buys industrial warehouse in Chesterfield for $3 million

Ukrop’s Dress Express, a Richmond-based provider of custom uniforms, purchased a 72,000-square-foot office warehouse in Chesterfield County for $3 million and plans to relocate its headquarters and distribution center to the site.

For 11 years, the company has been leasing 65,000 square feet of space  at 5160 Commerce Rd. in the city. The new site on seven acres in Sommerville Park will position the company for growth, said John Carrico, president and CEO of Ukrop's Dress Express. “The suburban location is nice. It's closer to where many of our associates live,” Carrico said of the park, located near the intersection of State Route 288 and Midlothian Turnpike.

He said the company plans to invest about $1 million renovating the current building and will relocate to Chesterfield by the end of the first quarter of 2016. “This way we can continue to grow in the future, because of the acreage without having to move.” Plus, the ceiling height in the new warehouse space is taller than where the company is now, allowing more space for storage.

“We have been very blessed,” Carrico says of the company's growth over the last 18 months when it picked up 275,000 new orders for employees in uniform. The bulk of those orders, about 200,000, came from the HEB grocery store chain, based out of Texas; Hy-Vee, a grocery store chain headquartered out of Des Moines, Iowa; and SeaWorld, Carrico said. “We are also a partial supplier for Wegmans,” he added, another  grocery store chain that will soon be opening two new stores in the Richmond area. 

The next market the company hopes to get into is uniforms for quick service restaurants such as Panera. “It's nice to have a facility where we can springboard even higher with our mission to provide nice uniform apparel to help good businesses execute even better,” Carrico said. 

David Williams and Jason Hetherington with the Richmond office of Colliers handled the transaction on behalf of the seller, Premier Pet Properties LLC. 

According to Colliers, the building was constructed in 2005 and includes 23,500 square feet of finished, two-story office space along with 7,000 square feet of production space and 41,500 square feet of high-bay warehouse space.