Global DuPage

Global DuPage: A Palestinian family saved to put their son through college. Years later, he returned the favor.

Today, we’re telling another story of a family that immigrated to the U.S. and built a legacy in DuPage County: the Elshafeis. It’s a story of love, war, business—and baklava.

Born in Palestine in 1962, Alan Elshafei (formally, Alaeddine Elshafei) understood the importance of family from an early age. He was the youngest of ten children, and his family largely relied on their small business—a sweet shop—to make ends meet.

When Alan’s siblings were still young, there was a rising tide of violence in Palestine, and the Elshafeis were forced to migrate. They settled in Lebanon, where Alan was born, and continued to run their pastry business out of a new location.

While Alan’s older siblings would have liked to pursue higher education, they recognized that their opportunities were limited. Instead, they decided to make a sacrifice: They put their energy into the family business, saving money to help their youngest brother attend college abroad.

It worked. When he was eighteen, Alan’s family had saved enough to send him to school in the United States. Despite struggling to learn English—at the time, Arabic and French were Lebanon’s primary languages—while also focusing on his studies, Alan earned a degree in electrical engineering.

Global DuPage

Later, Alan met a young woman, Nancie, and the pair moved to Chicago, where they married in 1983. Soon after, they launched a successful battery-manufacturing company—with Nancie as Chief Financial Officer—and moved to Lisle, where they continued to grow their family and their business. Ramsey Elshafei, Alan’s son, believes that his father’s struggles and work ethic early in life contributed to his later success.  

“My father’s family had a hard time in the middle east,” Ramsey says. “All the families who migrated from Palestine to Lebanon had to uproot their lives. I think that struggle is the reason why my dad was so successful when he came here. He had the work ethic and the drive.”

Inspired by his father, Ramsey went on to study engineering and build his own business. Today, he’s the president of RE Development Solutions, Inc. and a board member of Choose DuPage.

Ramsey Elshafei RE Development Solutions

Full circle

As their manufacturing business grew, Alan and Nancie put some resources aside—much like Alan’s siblings had done years before, to support his college education—and helped several of his brothers move their families from the Middle East to the U.S.

As Alan knew first-hand, settling in a new country is hard. To help with the transition, Alan and Nancie welcomed Alan’s siblings, along with their spouses and children, into the Elshafei home in Lisle. This gave the families a place to stay until they could find work and a permanent home—sometimes, for months at a time. 

“From my mom’s perspective, it’s like, suddenly you have all these random people living in your house, and there’s a language barrier. For her to continue doing that, family after family, says a lot about who she is,” Ramsey says.

“My parents have always had open arms. That makes my wife and I think about how we want to affect future generations, how we can give back.”

Global DuPage Elshafei Sweets

As for the sweet shop? Elshafei Sweets is still open for business—although it’s no longer in the Middle East. In fact, the business is in Palos Hills, Illinois, serving baklava and other treats inspired by the family’s roots.

Thanks for reading! For another story about the legacy of immigration in DuPage, take a look at our recent feature on the Elganzouri family.

 

Located just west of Chicago, DuPage County is a diverse community in many ways: culturally, economically and demographically. We are proud of the countless immigrants and the numerous cultures that wrote the history of DuPage, and we welcome all to join us as we make a better future.

To learn more about DuPage, start here.

Steinhafels Mattress

Steinhafels Plans to Open 112,000 SF Store in Downers Grove

The Downers Grove Economic Development Corporation announced today that Wisconsin-based, employee-owned Steinhafels, Inc. plans to open a 112,000 sq. ft. furniture store at 1021 Butterfield Road in Downers Grove.  The company will be making improvements to the exterior and interior of the building.  Steinhafels expects to open the store this fall.

“We are very excited to be opening our 11th Furniture and Mattress Superstore in Downers Grove this Fall. We look forward to welcoming over 50 new associates to our company. As an employee-owned company, we know our associates are our greatest asset.” said Steinhafels president, Andrew Steinhafel.  “We look forward to providing the residents of Downers Grove and surrounding communities with the area’s finest selection of furniture and mattresses along with an unsurpassed customer experience.”

Steinhafels is a fourth-generation furniture retailer, founded in 1934. The company sells quality home furnishings, mattresses and home décor.  Steinhafels currently has sixteen stores, fourteen in Wisconsin and two in Illinois.  The company projects that the Downers Grove store will have sales of $21 million in the first year, with 3% growth in subsequent years.  On May 4, 2021 the Steinhafels family announced it had sold its shares to an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), making the company 100% employee owned.

“Steinhafels is a great addition to Downers Grove, and to the Butterfield corridor” said Downers Grove Mayor Robert Barnett.  “They are an 87-year old company with a long tradition of serving their customers and the community, and we’re looking forward to welcoming the Steinhafels team to Downers Grove.”

Wood Dale, IL

In Wood Dale, economic growth is a jigsaw puzzle. Here’s how all the pieces fit into place.

For Wood Dale, the stakes were high when searching for tenants to occupy a new 342,000-square-foot development along Wood Dale Road.

Historically, logistics had been the area’s dominant sector. However, in 2018, the City of Wood Dale published its Comprehensive Plan; among other things, the plan outlined a vision to diversify the local economy, putting a greater emphasis on manufacturing and corporate usage. By focusing on a wider variety of sectors, the City aimed to bring a wider variety of benefits to the community: more jobs, more aesthetically attractive buildings, and more travel within Wood Dale, which would increase spending at local businesses and generate greater sales-tax revenue.

The new development, Bridge Point Wood Dale, was an opportunity for the City to put their plan into action. But there were some bumps along the way. Before it was redeveloped, the land had previously been a low-rise office site – it was vacant for nearly eight years – and, as anyone in real estate knows, developing an industrial property for commercial offices is anything but easy. (It’s less like a makeover, more like plastic surgery.) While many brokers were insisting it should be developed as a logistics location, the City of Wood Dale pushed for a commercial-industrial space. Eventually, they found a developer (Bridge) to bring this vision to life.

Today, Bridge Point Wood Dale consists of two commercial-industrial buildings, both in a highly visible location along a heavily traveled road, at a slightly higher elevation (by Illinois standards) than the surrounding area. When you’re driving through Wood Dale, you’re almost guaranteed to see them. Therefore, whatever tenants occupied these buildings would come to represent the community’s character and set a precedent for the future.

“Wood Dale Road is our front door,” said Ed Cage, the Community Development Director at the City of Wood Dale. “It tells everybody what we are about, as a community.”

nVenia

After several years of tough decisions, creative thinking and many, many meetings, two tenants moved into Bridge Point: Forward Space and nVenia (in 2020 and 2021, respectively). The new tenants bring a mix of corporate and manufacturing usage to Wood Dale—exactly what the City wanted.

“We aimed really high, and we got what we were looking for,” said Cage. “Actually, we got even more.”

Of course, getting a good tenant into a community is almost never easy. But Wood Dale faced a particularly puzzling series of challenges as they looked to fill this space.

The Jigsaw Puzzle

Historically, what has made Wood Dale so attractive to logistics companies—and now a blend of manufacturing and corporate users—is its strategic location.

Wood Dale sits just minutes west of O’Hare International Airport, next to Bensenville, along the I-390 corridor. I-290, I-355, Illinois Route 83 and other major highways are all nearby. This gives logistics companies (like Amazon, which has a Wood Dale facility) convenient access to multiple modes of transportation, allowing them to move goods quickly and efficiently to and from Midwest markets, and around the world.

Also, Wood Dale is in DuPage County, which has low property taxes. Cage said this is a major selling point for businesses that are considering the region.

“The number of people I’ve talked to who want to be in DuPage is huge,” he said. “As Community Development Director, that makes my job easier, because it gets people in the door.”

One of those companies is Nippon Express, a Japanese-owned logistics consulting business that integrates various modes of transportation into a one-stop solution.

For decades, Nippon was a tenant of two buildings in the northern quadrant of Wood Dale—an area that’s home to many of the community’s larger businesses—just south of Illinois Route 390.

As part of a strategy to synergize their Midwest operations, Nippon planned to grow their local presence—this included adding a corporate headquarters and relocating some 100 employees from their New York office to Wood Dale. However, the two buildings they currently occupied, which had been built in the 1980s, were out-of-date; they also didn’t offer the space that the company needed for the proposed expansion.

Nippon Express

Nippon needed a new location. Initially, they turned to Bridge Point, the new development along Wood Dale Road.

This created an interesting dilemma for the City. Nippon had been part of the community for decades, and, as a Fortune 500 business, they brought a large amount of money and jobs to the area. Obviously, the City wanted to retain them.

However, in order to relocate and expand their facility as planned, Nippon would have needed all of Bridge Point, and the City was already closing in on an agreement with another company, Forward Space, that wanted one of Bridge Point’s two buildings.

This dilemma—in which the goals of attracting new businesses and retaining existing ones sometimes appear to be at odds—represents one of Wood Dale’s greatest challenges:

Space.

Wood Dale is a “built-out” community, meaning that much of its land has been developed. Unlike some cities further away from Chicago, it doesn’t have acres of open land. This sometimes makes it tougher to evolve the community and accomplish certain goals, like those outlined in the Comprehensive Plan. They aren’t working with a blank canvas.

Instead, Cage prefers to see it as a puzzle.

“We have all these pieces of the jigsaw,” he said. “If you want to bring a new business into the community, you have to rearrange things, and you have to be careful about it.”

In order to solve the puzzle of Nippon (a business they wanted to retain) and Forward Space (a business they wanted to attract), the City found a creative solution. First, Cage and others worked to bring Nippon’s attention toward a 20-acre space along Route 83, a location that checked every box on the company’s wish list: It was close to a major highway; it offered the space they needed; and it allowed them the freedom to build their facility to their specifications.

At the time, the area was unincorporated and occupied by residential properties; so, the City partnered with a developer that bought-out the residential properties, annexed the space and even rebuilt a section of Bryn Mawr Avenue that led to the future Nippon Express location. (The road had to be updated to meet the standards of a corporate park.) The developer then built a 300,000-square-foot facility in the newly annexed space, which became Nippon’s new U.S. Corporate Headquarters and warehouse in February 2021.

Wood Dale, IL

With this solution, the City accomplished both of its goals: They retained an established Fortune 500 company while bringing in a new business (actually, two new businesses) with diverse usages.  

In Q4 of 2020, the smaller of the two Bridge Point buildings (100,378 square-feet; 650 N Wood Dale Rd) was leased to Forward Space, a commercial furniture dealer that also provides workplace planning and related services. The new Forward Space facility combined a corporate headquarters and a warehouse—right in line with Wood Dale’s diversification goal.

Forward Space

And then, in the spring of 2021, another business moved into the second, larger Bridge Point building (241,888 square-feet; 750 N Wood Dale Rd). nVenia, a new company formed by the consolidation of several Duravant entities, is a packaging equipment manufacturer and solutions provider. Their new manufacturing facility brings more than 200 jobs to the community, accomplishing additional goals of Wood Dale’s Comprehensive Plan: to bring in more workers and generate more spending at local businesses and greater sales-tax revenue.

The final piece of this economic-development puzzle is the pair of buildings that Nippon left behind along Route 390. Recently, a developer submitted a proposal to remodel both buildings, which will give the City an opportunity to attract more business.

“This is a good example of developing a built-out community in a smart way,” said Cage. “You move an existing business to another place within the community, where they can grow. Then, you develop the old site and use that space to bring in new tenants.”

With the right planning—and perhaps some serendipity—all the pieces fit into place.

A “Front-Page” Community

Logistics has been and will continue to be a major part of the Wood Dale economy. But now, as they retain and attract a wider variety of businesses, the City wants you to see their community as a prime location for corporate and manufacturing users, among others.

In addition to working the “jigsaw puzzle” that makes this evolution possible, the community is being proactive. Recently, Cage noted that the City’s restrictions on building height—buildings in Wood Dale couldn’t be taller than 37 feet, unless the developer had a variance—was limiting developers that wanted to create buildings that would attract the very kind of tenants the City wanted.

During a meeting, Cage asked the City Council to vote to raise the maximum height from 37 to 42 feet. They raised it to 45.

“That sent a message,” he said.

Over the last several years, Cage and other City officials have worked to establish closer relationships with real-estate brokers and developers, helping them understand the kind of users that Wood Dale is looking to attract. Cage said these relationships—along with the City’s proactive stance and stories of businesses like Nippon, Forward Space and nVenia—are making Wood Dale a top choice.

“Years ago, I wouldn’t say that Wood Dale was always on the front page of everyone’s list, so to speak. Now, we’ve moved up.

“It’s a combination of being in DuPage County, our City being welcome to new businesses and developments, and everyone understanding the goals of our Comprehensive Plan.

“I’d say we’re now on the front page—top of the list.”

Wood Dale is a community in DuPage County, Illinois. Just west of Chicago, DuPage offers a strategic location at the heart of an international cargo gateway, as well as a collaborative environment between the public and private sector, a culturally diverse community, beautiful parks and trails, excellent schools and responsible local governance. Learn more about DuPage’s business climate here.