California. A very big state with a very big population. In fact, it’s the largest consumer market in the U.S. and thus a very sensible place to have a distribution center. Making California even more sensible, from a distribution perspective, is the fact that most of the Pan-Pacific freight arrives via its ports. For many companies, these combined facts make logistics strategy simple: place a DC in California close to the arriving port and the West Coast distribution riddle is solved.
Looking a bit closer, however, we can see that West Coast distribution isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at choosing the right California warehouse space for your company and the impact it has on your port-to-market speed.