Worcester Business Journal

FOCUS: Meetings Guide & Golf Directory Big investment gains on campus 11 Central Mass. colleges reaped healthy returns on endowments in '14. How businesses sweat the details in organizing corporate meetings. WBJ >> To Subscribe Q&A with Anne Hardy of Saint- Gobain's research and development center, Northborough. Shop Talk 8 12 Long known as a furniture hub, 'Chair City' has used its long-standing manufacturing knowhow to help transform its economic base into a new era J oshua Cormier was born and raised in Gardner. From his time as a young boy in the 1980s on thriving downtown streets that were still supported by furniture manufacturers to his time as a city councilor and now as the city's economic development officer, Cormier has witnessed a transformation in Gardner. Like many communities, Gardner was once a thriving manufacturing city that struggled after losing much of that old manufacturing base. Today, the city's economic base includes a mix of small businesses and manufacturers that create such products as medical equipment, electronic cable and materials used in medical research. In the next five years, Gardner-based companies are expected to add 150 manufacturing jobs. BY SAM BONACCI Worcester Business Journal Staff Writer Gardner's transformation has included a recently completed, 12,500-square-foot expansion of New England Peptide and a 51,000-square-foot expansion that's underway at Advanced Cable Ties (ACT), which makes plastic cable ties. But Cormier and others believe that what worked for Gardner in decades past, as the "Furniture Capital of the World" and "Chair City," also works today: the local base of former factory workers. When Precision Optics began hiring after its founding in 1982, there was a strong base of people with transferrable skills who could work on the extremely small optics that are sometimes only twice the size of a human hair, said President Joseph Forkey. W hen Grossman Development Group LLC, the force behind a mixed-use project at the site of the former Spag's in Shrewsbury, officially signed two new 'Whole Foods Effect' hits Central Mass. Can a high-end retailer lift surrounding property values? BY LIVIA GERSHON Special to the Worcester Business Journal Developer Howard Grossman is bringing Whole Foods and other retailers to Shrewsbury. >> Continued on Page 10 commercial tenants earlier this month, President Howard Grossman said one factor drove their interest. "As soon as they hear that Whole Foods is your anchor tenant they know, number one, the number of customers, and also the quality of customers," he said. The Whole Foods location set to open next year in Shrewsbury will supplement its existing Central Massachusetts locations in Wayland, Framingham and Bellingham. Like Wegmans' choice of Northborough for its first New England store in 2011, the planned Whole Foods store signals something more than just another place for local customers to buy milk and eggs. For years, observers have noted some- thing called the "Whole Foods effect": when the high-end grocer moves into a neighborhood, local real estate values tend to rise. It's not clear that this is really a matter of cause and effect, or >> Continued on Page 26 P H O T O / S A M B O N A C C I Don Irving, of Data Guide Cable, in front of the manufacturing floor that harkens back to Gardner 's manufacturing past. Central Massachusetts' Source for Business News March 30, 2015 Volume 26 Number 7 www.wbjournal.com $2.00

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