A former Flojet Corp. warehouse in Foothill Ranch now is the home of clothing hanger maker Shanti Industries Inc.
Flojet’s parent, ITT Corp., leased out the 103,000-square-foot building for nearly $62,000 per month after it sat vacant for about a year. The space leased for 60 cents per square foot.
Flojet moved out after consolidating at a Santa Ana facility, where ITT develops its HydroAir products for pools, spas and showers.
ITT bought Orange-based Hydro Air Industries Inc. in 1999, the same year it bought Flojet, a pump maker.
Some of its Flojet operations from Foothill Ranch were moved to a plant in Britain.
Flojet has another facility in Gloucester, Mass.
There are about 100 workers at ITT’s Santa Ana facility. About 75 jobs were cut before the company closed down its Foothill Ranch operation, spokesman Bjorn Von Euler said.
Flojet makes small electric and air-operated pumps used for things like soda fountains and bailing water out of boats. It also makes equipment for the agriculture industry.
The company was founded in 1975 by arts patron Benjamin Du and originally made pumps for cleaning tools.
ITT, based in White Plains, N.Y., makes products for the water, defense and transportation industries. It has yearly sales of more than $8 billion.
The company’s new Foothill Ranch tenant, Shanti, plans to crank out as many as 600 million wire and plastic hangers a year at the warehouse.
Shanti makes more than a billion hangers a year, most of them at an 80,000-square-foot building in Wisconsin.
Shanti could be the last hanger maker in the country, according to the company’s president, 24-year-old Darmesh Patel.
The hangers, which are sold mostly to clothing companies such as uniform makers, make up about 60% of its business.
The rest of its business comes from selling garment bags, tags, tapes, ropes, ties, stretch wrap and anything else requested by a customer, Patel said.
“The diversity of products allows us to compete with China,” he said.
Patel also said that the quality of his hangers could draw in more customers than the thinner Chinese products.
In its first full year of business, Shanti is looking to do about $1 million in revenue. It counts 15 workers in Foothill Ranch.
The upgrade from Shanti’s former 20,000-square-foot site in Lake Forest is part of a bid to reach a goal of $5 million in sales for 2008, Patel said.
Patel’s family started the business after it grew tired of operating their 40 dry cleaners in the county, he said. Long hours and having to deal with the public became a burden to the family, which saw an opportunity to become a manufacturer, he said.
The family sold its dry cleaners and owns 80% of the new business. The rest comes from a group of private investors.
The Patel family started making the garment plastic bags it used in its dry cleaning business and expanded into hangers.
“We found that everyone who was interested in bags were also interested in hangers,” Patel said.
Shanti also is working on bringing its own clothes-cleaning product to the market.
Pending a patent for the rub-on application, it could be a key driver for the company, Patel said.
