Woodland Airstream Celebrates Grand Opening in Michigan – RVBusiness – Breaking RV Industry News
CLARKSTON, Mich. – With the recent Grand Opening of its store in Clarkston, Mich., Woodland Airstream is now up to three locations – all under the Airstream-exclusive store model – with a fourth on its way.
Woodland Airstream cut the ceremonial ribbon on its store in Clarkston, which is about 45 minutes northwest of Detroit in affluent Oakland County, on Thursday, March 21. The store joins Woodland’s other locations in Grand Rapids, Mich., and Lebanon, Ind., which is just outside Indianapolis. Construction is underway on the fourth location, which is in Georgetown, Ken., and officials said the company is open to further expansion – just as long as it’s another Airstream-exclusive store.
“I would never do it any other way, because our focus is entirely on Airstream,” said John Gustafson, president of Woodland Airstream. “Every employee knows exactly what model has ducted A/C, composite floors, tankless water heaters and so on. And that is so beneficial to the customer when they walk in. Because we can say, yep, you’re looking at this used Airstream and these are the differences, and this is the value. That’s big for the customer.
“And service-wise too,” he continued. “If you’re playing with the same parts every day, you’re looking at the same things every day, you’re not taking two hours to fix it. You’re taking 15 minutes, because you’ve done it so much.
“So, when the synergies build – and build, and build – and then you add multiple locations to that, it gets even better,” Gustafson added. “With multiple dealerships, we see commonalities, we see threads, we can jump on things quicker. Same thing when we have four different lots. I can now transfer things within a day and I can have any unit a customer’s looking for – and there’s a lot of Airstream SKUs now. So, I don’t have to have high inventories at every lot. But I can have every unit, and with one F-250 and a tank of gas, I can have that unit transferred to where the customer needs it.”
The Clarkston location, Gustafson explained, was two-and-a-half years in the making. The 16-acre property has room for expansion and the goal is to have “full concierge service.”
“We’ll have close to 50 new units on site, and about half of that in used inventory at any moment,” he said. “We have four delivery bays and we have eight pull-through bays for service, but you could put four in each so you could double that. So, it’s about 16 units we could work on at one time in our service center.”
Gustafson added the Clarkston store has a parts and accessories store as well as, sometime later this year, a modest rental fleet.
The Airstream-exclusive model is one the OEM itself has been nurturing for several years now. The Jackson Center, Ohio-based manufacturer has specific formulas – including the number of Airstream owners in any given market – that are used to determine where an Airstream-exclusive store should be located, the size of its territory, how many service bays it needs, and the level of certified staffing it will require, among other things.
The company broke ground on the Kentucky location only a little more than a month ago, and Gustafson said everyone is looking forward to cutting the ribbon on that store later this fall. The location is near a 350-campsite RV park and horse farm that is a popular destination for Airstream owners, he said.
