Just two hours
from Mexico
Las operaciones de Sohnen tienen su sede en Santa Fe Springs, California, donde opera dos instalaciones a gran escala que emplea a más de 150 personas. Una de las dos instalaciones actúa como el Centro Nacional de Recepción de Sohnen [National Receiving Center-NRC], donde el fabricante y las fuentes de suministro de los minoristas envían sus devoluciones de productos. Posteriormente, los productos se preparan para su envío a las instalaciones de Sohnen en Tijuana, México, para su procesamiento.
ABOUT US
Our History
Sohnen Enterprises was founded in Los Angeles, California in 1971 by Barry Sohnen. At the time, Sohnen provided wholesale repair services to the importers and manufacturers of consumer electronic products that were popular at the time including portable radios, tape players and stereo systems. The initial business model was very simple and straightforward. Sohnen charged its suppliers a flat fee per unit to repair their product returns. Relatively early in its history, the business changed from this “Fee For Service” arrangement to a new business model wherein Sohnen simply purchased the defective returns outright and then refurbished, repackaged and ultimately resold them to it’s growing list of dealers and distributors. In so doing, Sohnen established itself as the pioneer in the consumer product refurbishing and resale business. Over its past half century in business, Sohnen moved from its first location pictured to the right to increasingly larger spaces, which today include a total of five separate large-scale factories and warehouses measuring close to one million square feet, located in Santa Fe Springs, California and Tijuana, Mexico. Over the course of its history, Sohnen has refurbished tens of millions of units of assorted consumer electronic products and small appliances while generating billions of dollars in sales to Sohnen. Along the way, Sohnen has been fortunate to attract and retain a team of incredibly talented and dedicated employees that have enabled the business to continually provide manufacturers and retailers with a time proven method to maximize their financial recovery and quickly convert their returned products into salable inventory.
Sohnen Enterprises First Location 1971
Sohnen's Core Competency
In its most basic form, the Sohnen of today performs four primary functions: We Receive, Refurbish, Repackage and Resell a wide variety of consumer products including Televisions, Computers, Audio and small and mid-sized Appliances. Although doing just that alone is complicated enough, Sohnen provides many other additional value-added benefits to our suppliers. To begin with, we often act as a supplier’s National Return Center wherein we become the centralized shipping point for retailers to have their store locations ship their product returns to. Shipments are catalogued, documented and then forwarded on to Sohnen’s highly automated and
technologically advanced refurbishing operations in Tijuana. As a part of the refurbishing process, we are able to provide critical production repair information to our suppliers that allows them to make product quality improvements and thereby reduce future returns. Returns are by nature a costly, disorganized and inefficient “fact of life” for most retailers and manufacturers. Sohnen’s core competency is to bring order, efficiency and half a century of know how to this aspect of the business and thereby maximize the financial recovery of the product returns and reduce losses and waste.
Sohnen's Suppliers and Customers
Retail sales of consumer products continues to increase every year. Competition in the market is fierce and regardless of the type of retailer involved, returns are a reality of the business. Many manufacturers lack the people or infrastructure to effectively manage the processing of dealer returns and often look to Sohnen to handle it for them. Retailers are increasingly finding themselves responsible to manage their own returns as more manufacturers provide them with a “No Returns Allowance” on their purchases. The overall volume of product returns continues to increase every year due to the continuous growth in sales but also due to the changing methods of retailing with more goods than ever before being sold online, which typically generate even higher return rates than from brick-and-mortar locations. Many retailers are forced to liquidate their own returns, which usually results in them recovering just pennies on the dollar. Others simply send them to landfill. Selling the returns to Sohnen maximizes their financial recovery while providing a controlled, reliable and environmentally safe methodology for handling the products themselves. Some retailers will sell Sohnen their returns and then buy some back to be resold on their own websites. Online marketplaces have become an important outlet for small to mid-sized companies who want to take advantage of the enormous market reach of industry leaders including Amazon, E-Bay, Walmart.com and others. As such, an important group of resellers has now entered the marketplace and they look to Sohnen to provide them with high quality, affordable refurbished products in “like new” condition that they can successfully resell on these major websites. In short, if you are a Manufacturer, Retailer or Reseller, then Sohnen has a lot to offer you.
