A new office building and production facility on Woodland Avenue near the Opportunity Corridor Boulevard for Reese Consumer Health will allow the company to take advantage of growth opportunities (Bialosky). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
New facility brightens Buckeye-Woodhill’s future
Last year, Cleveland-based Reese Pharmaceutical rebooted its business and changed its name to Reese Consumer Health. Next year, the company plans to change its headquarters-production location. And in subsequent years, it hopes those efforts will expand its business and add new jobs.
In so doing, the 120-year-old, family-held company is playing a visible role in a larger effort to reboot the Buckeye-Woodhill neighborhood as well. A significant amount of development is happening here and in the Kinsman neighborhood to the south of Woodland Avenue.
Reese Consumer Health is seeking City Planning Commission approval to build its new facilities at 10101 Woodland Ave. on 9.4 acres of land being assembled by the city. The land, located just off the Opportunty Corridor Boulevard, is in the process of being cleaned up and will likely be sold to Reese Consumer Health.
The site was saddled for decades with a vacant factory built in 1925 for Clark Controller Co. which made electrical controls for industrial machinery. In 1965, the Victoreen Instrument Co. acquired the plant to make devices that measured X-ray exposure. The plant was vacated in 1994 and wasn’t demolished until 2019.
Site plan for Reese Consumer Health’s consolidated production facilities and expanded, modernized offices. The 9.4-acre site is bounded by Woodland Avenue to the south and the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority’s Woodhill Garage to the north. To the east is Woodhill Road and the elevated CSX Transportation railroad tracks to the west (Bialosky).
Proposed to be built on the cleared and cleaned land is a 75,000-square-foot facility, with 16,000 square feet of it allocated to offices and the rest to production. Reese Consumer Health President Jeff Reese told NEOtrans in a phone interview that the site offers the ability to expand its facilities by another 50,000 square feet if demand warrants it.
“We’re moving because of our current facility constraints,” Reese said. “Last year we refocused our strategy. And with that strategy, we intend to grow rapidly. We are at maximum capacity. We can’t add new package lines and we’ve turned down business that would have increased revenue 50 percent.”
Reese started out as a chemical company, then transitioned into a pharmaceutical company and now takes bulk products from other manufacturers and repackages them for retail sale at CVS, Walgreens, Walmart and grocery stores. The company has also recently started taking on international brand lines.
Its offices and some of its production facilities have been at 10617 Frank Ave. near University Circle since 1937 — a nearly 14,000-square-foot space Reese calls “dingy” and “a liability.” The company expanded to spaces at four addresses leased from two landlords at and near 1617 E. 40th St.
An elevated view looking easterly at Reese Consumer Health’s planned new offices with two parking lots offering 99 spaces total plus spacious truck loading docks (Bialosky).
“It’s a wildly inefficient duplication of process, with wasted movement,” Reese explained. “It needs improvement.”
The new site just off the Opportunity Corridor will be a modern, one-story structure with offices fronting on Woodland and the production spaces behind, surrounded by landscaping. But the new facility will be about more than just costs and revenues.
“We simply don’t have a facility that represents who we are as an organization,” Reese said. “We face an inability to attract and retain top talent. And we want to take care of the people who have been here 10, 20, 30 years. We want to give them a new home.”
At last count, the company has about 65 employees; Reese anticipates hiring more. But he was reluctant to discuss how many new hires might result from the relocation. Part of the reason is that the new production facilities will also make greater use of automation.
A conceptual view inside Reese Consumer Health’s planned new facility. These plans will be reviewed by the City Planning Commission’s Design Review Committee on Friday (Bialosky).
Developing in this area raises eyebrows today. But before the Opportunity Corridor was built in 2021, it wasn’t even considered. Not only was there no momentum, there was no available land. The city, the Cuyahoga Land Bank and the Site Readiness for Good Jobs Fund has been aggressively assembling, cleaning up and marketing former industrial lands here.
Part of the neighborhood’s change is due to the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority’s demolition and redevelopment of the massive, aging Woodhill Homes complex underway just across Woodhill Road into a mixed-income community. Several other mixed-income developments nearby have resulted as well.
Reese Consumer Health’s role in the reboot of the Buckeye-Woodhill neighborhood was not lost Reese, who lives in Shaker Heights, as well as his family who built the business over the years.
“I have an affection for the area,” Reese added. “We could have moved to the suburbs and gotten more public assistance. But it was important for us to stay in the community. With our growth, we could attract other business and other industry to come to this area. You see a lot of clean up already happening. We hope to be a catalyst for more.”
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