Red Stag Fulfillment looks to the future with $300 million campus in Sweetwater

Knoxville-based e-commerce company Red Stag Fulfillment is getting a $300 million, 420-acre campus that will increase capacity and expand operations.

The site, proposed last year, is being developed and funded by Mollenhour Gross LLC, a private investment company founded in 2004 by Jordan Mollenhour and Dustin Gross.

Gross and Mollenhour are also the co-founders of Red Stag, which will lease the property.

Hundreds of people gathered inside the shell of the first building for a ceremonial groundbreaking Wednesday.

Much like how Amazon operates, the buildings will be used for storing inventory from small- to medium-size online businesses to customers.

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"This is what businesses are going to be built off of," CEO Dusty Holcomb said. "This is where careers are going to be built. This is where our community is going to be built."

This is the first of six buildings that will be constructed along a half-mile stretch of Interstate 75 off Oakland Road. The next five buildings will be similarly sized at around 700,000 square feet each, and the project could create about 3,500 jobs from warehouse stock pickers to IT professionals.

The company has a facility and headquarters in Knoxville on Island River Drive, but Mollenhour said the company has outgrown the space.

"We have 600,000 square feet in Knox County and it's completely full," Mollenhour told Knox News. "This is just an expansion runway for us to continue growing."

Mollenhour told Knox News there's no specific timetable for when the facilities will be built, but plans for the next building are underway.

Red Stag chose Sweetwater out of 70 locations for its proximity to Knoxville and the city's culture.

"The culture here in Sweetwater, and really all of East Tennessee, for us, was dead center in that target," Mollenhour said.

The expansion comes as good news for the expanding city of Sweetwater. Once the Red Stag project is completed, the facilities will bring $1.5 million in property tax revenue to the city and about $3 million to Monroe County.

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"Things are happening here in Sweetwater and we are blessed," Doyle said. "We are blessed beyond measure that we've got a company like Red Stag coming to Sweetwater."

Red Stag was founded in 2013 by by Mollenhour and Gross. The company also has a campus in Salt Lake City. It employs about 400 Tennesseans.

Silas Sloan: Covering growth and development in East Tennessee
Twitter: @silasloan| Email: silas.sloan@knoxnews.com
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This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Red Stag Fulfillment builds Sweetwater Tennessee campus