Ensconced in a new home, Windy City buys CW Cable

BOLINGBROOK, Ill.--Now fully moved into new headquarters that nearly tripled its warehousing space, distributor Windy City Wire has moved further into expansion mode with the acquisition of CW Cable, a distributor serving the Northwest, including Seattle and Portland. Terms of the deal were not released. Co-owner and co-founder Rich Galgano "had been talking about this company for two or three months," said Windy City marketing director Stephanie Richter, "then he went to visit them about a month ago and sealed the deal right away." She characterized CW as a "smaller company, with just the one office, but they were a growing company that needed a little bit of a pickup." CW's management and employees will be retained, and Windy City is currently in the process of fleshing out the inventory at the CW warehouse. Windy City, which did roughly $56 million in sales last year, is growing rapidly, said Richter. In addition to warehouses in Secaucus, N.J., and Tempe, Ariz., the company operates a sales office in Los Angeles and is looking to add a warehousing space there. "Dallas is another area we're looking at," Richter said. "Hopefully in the next six months to a year we'll have two new locations." The distributor does not operate retail locations, other than a small will-call operation at its headquarters here, with the rest done through phone and e-commerce sales. However, to connect better with customers, the company has opened a new training facility here and will be educating dealers on its signature SmartWire product, designed to save installers time and money with their cabling thanks to color-coded printing. Now with more than 70 employees, Richter said Windy City will continue to look at acquiring smaller distributors and adding new inventory. Last summer, the company added a number of home automation and pro A/V suppliers, and added fiber to its catalog in March.