Withers Worldwide’s path to global success started with a horse cart
By Kylie Wang
In 1909, the Withers family immigrated from Minnesota to South Florida to try their hand at farming potatoes in a warmer climate. The problem? Their wooden plows couldn’t handle the rocky terrain. So, they decided to head back to Minnesota.
At the train station where they were looking to sell their horse and dray (a large wagon used for heavy deliveries), they met employees of the Flagler Group, who hired the family on the spot to help move their trunks from the station to their hotel (the Royal Palm Hotel, where the Kimpton EPIC now stands on the Miami River). This was the humble beginning of Withers Worldwide – today a global leader in transportation solutions for the hospitality industry.
Chip Withers, a SVP of Withers Transportation Systems and the great-grandson of Johnny Withers (he of the original horse and dray), entered the business in the mid-1970s, back when it was mostly focused on dry goods and warehousing. But with the federal government deregulating the airline and trucking industries, and other transportation firms moving into the market, Withers knew the company had to make changes if it was going to thrive, let alone survive. The decision was to specialize.
“It was really quite a transition for us,” says Withers. “We went all in in the early ‘80s, into hospitality… from only warehousing to domestic and international freight, warehousing, and setup.” This became the company’s “three-legged stool,” encompassing transportation, storage, and installation, principally for hotels. Withers Worldwide might move just one product to three or four different locations across the globe for manufacturing and assembly before installing it. “We’ve moved raw fabric from Korea to France to be dyed and printed, then to the United States to be flame-coated, and then back to a factory in China or Vietnam to be made into a piece of furniture,” Withers says. “Then we move that piece of furniture into the lobby of the Kapalua Ritz-Carlton [in Hawaii].” Today, the company’s clients include prominent hotel chains like Hilton and Marriott, with locations from Seoul, Korea to Copenhagen, Denmark. “If you were to take a hotel and turn it on its end, everything that fell out of it is basically what we handle,” Withers says.
This broad, beginning-to-end approach forced the company to focus on details. “Some of these hotels can have 20,000 line items, when you look at everything from the demitasse spoons to the throw rugs in the bathroom,” Withers says. That’s not even considering some more specific handcrafted items, which are often “shipped” using non-traditional methods – like horses, which have been part of the Withers Worldwide experience since 1909, you’ll remember. Or perishables, which often require some sort of refrigerated storage. “We’ve flown fish from the Pacific Rim into Atlantis in the Bahamas. We’ve moved sea lions. We’ve moved truckloads full of carpet. We do the maître d’ stands, the uniforms that people wear, the ladders that the maintenance guy uses to change a light bulb,” says Withers.
The company currently employs about 50 people, including a wide range of third-party contract employees, and moves around $300 million to $600 million worth of products in a year. It doesn’t own its own warehouses, vessels, trucks, or airplanes, but simply rents or hires them. “Instead of tying the money up in hard assets like that, it was easier to use it for operating capital and to build on the IT side,” Withers explains – which is how the firm developed Withers Management Solutions service, a set of protocols and software that optimize savings and maximize time efficiency. Its cross-platform tracking system compiles data in real-time to allow clients to make changes quickly and on the go, tracking purchase orders that can span hundreds of items, not all of which are shipped together at once. Getting those hundreds of specific items into the correct hotel suites is yet another complication. “We know the industry. We know that if a fabric isn’t shipped in time to be made into a chair 20 weeks before the hotel opens, it can affect room sales when they’re ready to open,” the company president says.
So, what’s next? With nine out of 10 of the company’s customers being either return clients or new ones brought on by personal references, all that really matters to Withers Worldwide is quality. “We’ve always felt that if we could just keep our heads forward and do the best that we can, we can enjoy an eight to 10 percent [annual] growth,” Withers says. “And that’s pretty much where we’ve been over the last 40 years. It’s keeping our current clients happy and taking on the clients that we’re looking forward to working with. Our main competitor is ourselves.”
