Spark R&D Purchase New Building to Support Biz Growth
Spark R&D is pleased to announce the purchase of a second building in Bozeman, Montana The new building will be home to an office and extra storage space for raw materials and finished products.
Press Release:
R&D Continues Growth Adding a Second Building in Bozeman, Montana
Spark R&D has announced the purchase of a second building in Bozeman, Montana. The new building is directly across the street from their current 12,000 sq ft headquarters and adds an additional 7,000 square feet of mixed office and warehouse space for the company to utilize.
“We’ve known for some time now that we were going to need to expand our physical space,” explains Will Ritter, Spark R&D’s owner and lead designer. “We’ve been scaling for years, but the last few seasons in particular we’ve seen an incredible increase in demand for splitboard gear. In terms of manufacturing, we had simply run out of ways to move our machinery and people around or store the massive amounts of raw materials we use to operate at this level.”
The new warehouse
Spark’s owner and CFO, Becca Ritter elaborates, “We’ve been working on this for years, but Bozeman [Montana] is not the easiest place to find commercial real-estate. We had architectural plans drawn up to expand on our current lot, but with a stroke of luck, we were able to purchase the building adjacent to us privately from some nice local Montanans. The greenest building is one that already exists, so it feels good from a sustainability perspective as well.”
The company finalized the purchase in October of 2021 and moved their entire finished product warehouse across the street shortly after closing on the building. This move freed up space to immediately add a brand-new EC-400 milling machine with a 7-pallet changer along with a new Automatic Lathe screw machine which aided in the final production runs for the 21/22 season.
Will continues, “We definitely took advantage of the additional space this season, but more importantly, the addition gives us the ability to plan for future growth. We now have space to add more employees, add new machines, and perhaps most crucially, store raw materials. Supply chain constraints have us buying everything from aluminum to cardboard boxes in much larger quantities, and much earlier than in the past.”
The new building comes at an important time for the company. Spark R&D has committed to an aggressive production schedule to keep pace with demand and is also planning to release updated tech on its T1 bindings.
Becca explains, “We have to move forward, take calculated risks, improve our products, and grow our manufacturing capacity. It’s a lot of pressure, and dealers and the splitboard community are really counting on us, but we have a pretty incredible team here and they’re up for it.”
Beyond housing the finished product and storing raw materials, the new building will also house Spark’s shipping, customer service, sales, and marketing teams.
