Posted on Thu, Sep. 30, 2004
Costume seller Morris moves base
LEIGH DYER
Staff Writer
Philip Morris, owner of one of the nation's largest wholesale costume sellers, said he is consolidating his rapidly growing Charlotte-based business onto more than 70 acres in the University Research Park.
Morris Costumes will exit six warehouse and distribution facilities along Monroe Road as it creates a distribution center in a former Solectron USA building in northeast Charlotte, at 6900 Solectron Drive. The Morris Costumes retail store will remain at Monroe and Wendover roads, Morris said Wednesday.
Morris' holding company bought the 180,000 square-foot building and about 73 acres of land from Solectron in a $3.575 million transaction that closed earlier this month, Mecklenburg County Register of Deeds records show.
Morris said he had been eyeing the move as the outfit's revenues have grown by double-digit percentages each of the last several years. He sought a property with extra acreage to allow for expansion. "If we keep growing like this, we may have to," he said.
About 10,000 businesses buy his costumes, props and other stage products. His retail store, entering its busiest season as Halloween approaches, accounts for less than 10 percent of his revenues, he said.
The location was not his first choice -- Morris had aimed to buy the former Super Kmart property at Independence Boulevard and Sardis Road North, but technicalities caused a deal to fall through, Morris said. That building remains vacant.
Of the six buildings the business is leaving along Monroe Road, three are leased and Morris will put the other three up for sale, he said. The consolidation should be complete by early next year.
Morris started his business in the 1960s by making gorilla suits from his home. By the 1970s, it had grown to a national costume distributor, and in the 1990s, it branched into the amusement park industry. Morris has created a buzz in the costume industry by saying in a book published earlier this year that he supplied a gorilla suit to the makers of a 1967 film of Bigfoot long used as evidence of the existence of sasquatch in northern California.
One of his white gorilla suits appeared in the 1971 James Bond movie "Diamonds are Forever," and his company supplied masks to the 1991 Keanu Reeves movie "Point Break." -- OBSERVER STAFF REPORTS AND STAFF WRITER DOUG SMITH CONTRIBUTED.
-- LEIGH DYER: (704) 358-5058; LDYER@CHARLOTTEOBSERVER.COM.
