It took two years to find a new permanent home for Item Group, but only two days to make an offer on the 80,000-square-foot facility on Dupont Drive, off Route 10 in Providence.
“When we purchased the building … there was very little real estate inventory for sale,” said Stephen Lane, co-founder and CEO of the 20-year-old product development firm. “When we found this, though it was larger than our needs, we scooped it up.”
The space is actually eight times larger than the firm’s former three spaces in the Jewelry District downtown combined, he said. But that’s OK.
“The new facility gives us room to expand in the future,” Lane said.
And because it sits on eight acres, Item could build a whole campus on the site.
Though Lane wouldn’t disclose the actual rate of growth the company has experienced, he said, “We’ve begun the scaling process. We’ve moved from an incremental growth model to one that can scale.”
One big reason the principals started looking for a new space was because they wanted a central place where each of the three companies under the Item Group umbrella could grow at its own pace while leveraging the brain trust of all 100 employees working at the companies, Lane said.
Until last year the three companies – Item New Product Development, Ximedica and Innovation Chain Partners – were operating as divisions of Item Group. The principals decided to separate them and incorporate each because they could foresee greater growth potential of the companies operating separately rather than together.
The new facility offers a great advantage because it is large enough to house Ximedica’s medical device assembly needs, Lane said.
It has dedicated assembly space, prototype manufacturing space, testing labs for new products and a quality control lab. All are crucial for the production of medical devices because many require ISO certification and must comply with U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations.
And being all on one level instead of scattered between three buildings and multiple floors is expected to increase each company’s productivity.
Lane said the open design of the new space encourages dialogue, collaboration and mentoring. Several U-shaped desk clusters linked together form the main office space at the new facility. In each cluster there could be up to four employees from different disciplines or different levels of hierarchy.
For example, one cluster might combine a new designer with a senior designer and a program manager. The idea is to get as many ideas circulating between disciplines and management levels in order to come up with the best new product ideas and execution.
Item runs a flat, or horizontal, management structure because it creates an atmosphere where people want to be involved, Lane said.
“You get a better result and a loyal staff,” he said. “It’s key because everything we’re doing, we’re doing for the first time … the specifications of new products are moving until you get to the end. A flatter management structure, I think, optimizes the result and the efficiency.”
Item purchased and renovated the facility for $6.3 million. The grand opening was April 26.
The company financed the project through a U.S. Small Business Administration-backed Bank of America loan and loans from the Providence Economic Development Partnership and the R.I. Economic Development Corporation.
“They all stepped up and enabled us to make this move and stay in Providence,” Lane said. “There is no way we could have [made] this significant of an expansion without them.”
The RIEDC loaned Item $750,000 through its Small Business Loan Fund program, said Katharine Flynn, director of business development at the RIEDC.
It was good to assist Item because the company is very innovative she said.
“They took their core competencies and expanded into medical devices,” she said. “This is exactly the type of company we’re trying to attract to the state and expand. … They are an important employer and they’ve grown tremendously.”
