Sunnyside Parts Warehouse
- July 2006It was 1950 in Chicago. Bridgeport native Martin Kennelly was the mayor of the city, while Richard J. Daley was moving up the ranks at City Hall. In his pre-burger magnate days, Ray Kroc was traveling across the country selling Multimixer milkshake machines. "Truth or Consequences" made its debut on television. Bill Murray was born in Wilmette, Illinois. And George Halas won his 200th game while coaching the Chicago Bears. Meanwhile, Patrick DeMichele built a warehouse at the corner of Montrose and Artesian Avenues to support his burgeoning auto parts business. No stranger to the Lincoln Square neighborhood, Patrick owned and operated an auto repair shop that became a DeSoto dealership on Lincoln, just north of Sunnyside Avenue, across the street from where the Old Town School of Folk Music is today. He liked the name Sunnyside, which oddly seemed to follow him around. So as his business grew, he picked up the name and applied it to various ventures. Two generations later, the sturdy brick warehouse is still family-owned and still bears the name Sunnyside Parts Warehouse. Business may have changed since the 1950s, but the level of service and commitment at Sunnyside has remained the same.
Today, Sunnyside Parts Warehouse is a supplier of exclusively Mopar and Motorcraft parts. It sells mostly to businesses, but is happy to serve any neighbors looking for Chrysler or Ford parts. "We're not a parts store as most people initially think," explains Dan DeMichele, current General Manager and grandson of the founder. "We have a retail outlet where the public is welcome—we have a whole group of do-it-yourselfers who have been our friends for years. But our customers are largely other businesses." Typical Sunnyside Parts Warehouse customers include body shops, service stations, dealerships and fleets, including rentals and delivery trucks. But anyone interested in Chrysler or Ford parts can come to the classic Chicago-style warehouse, built to Patrick DeMichele's specifications, and just walk around the back to the service desk entrance. As a courtesy, Sunnyside Parts Warehouse has kept copies of all Chrysler and Ford parts catalogs for every year dating back to 1950. "If a part is still made and we don't have it, we can usually get it in a day or two," says Dan. "We can also use a parts locator to track it down to see if it's sitting on a shelf somewhere at another parts warehouse. It's all very networked now." When someone wanders in looking to fix their Toyota, the Sunnyside employees will happily recommend other resources for imported car parts.
If you think that Sunnyside Parts Warehouse is a dirty old parts store, think again. It's an incredibly efficient, orderly place that has not only kept up with the times, but evolved beyond its competitors. A walk through the modern warehouse takes you past the parts counter at the door and down a hall where a sign reminds you to "Watch for forklifts." At the center of the floor is a chute where the products come down, packaged and ready for pick-up or deliveries. Upstairs in a former machine shop is the main warehouse, divided into a series of aisles with numbers painted on the floor for orientation. Hundreds of wooden bins up each aisle hold a dizzying array of parts, from the tiniest seals to entire windshields. The mammoth floor is divided 50-50 between Mopar and Motorcraft items. Everything sold at Sunnyside Parts Warehouse is a brand new, OEM part. "People really trust us to get the best quality, top-of-the-line products," says Dan. "We never stock or sell offshore brands." All told, Sunnyside Parts Warehouse tracks approximately 360,000 part numbers for Mopar and keeps many of these on hand so they can deliver them quickly to customers.
Before he founded Sunnyside Parts Warehouse—even before he opened his repair shop on Lincoln—the story of the Sunnyside Auto group began with Patrick DeMichele's entrepreneurial spirit. An Italian immigrant whose first job in America was working as a lumberjack started a legacy that lives on through a number of successful family businesses—Sunnyside Parts Warehouse among them. "My grandfather was very handy. He was not formally educated, but he had a great head for business," explains Dan. He left the lumberjack job without collecting a paycheck and settled in as a skilled machinist in the Midwest for a number of years, during which he sacrificed some whole fingers to a stamping press. Opportunity led Patrick and his wife Anna to open a restaurant on what was Elmhurst Flying Field in the 1920s. "His restaurant was filled with intrepid pilots who were crashing all the time," says Dan. "Both my dad and uncle were talented musicians. My uncle later on had his own radio show. When the pilots would come in late and have a drink, my dad and uncle were often roused out of bed to sing and play piano."
The mechanical savvy Patrick honed as a machinist made him adept at repairing cars, a valuable skill in the 1920s when the automobile first became affordable to the middle class. Someone needed to fix all of those cars on the road when they would inevitably break down. Patrick recognized this and opened a repair shop on Lincoln. In 1930, he negotiated a deal with Chrysler to turn his garage into a DeSoto dealership and a supplier of Chrysler parts. By the time he built the parts warehouse in 1950, the business had grown by leaps and bounds, requiring a space all its own. "My grandfather was the wholesaler for Mopar and the main parts distribution center for all the dealerships around Chicago," explains Dan. "It was a booming time. This place ran three shifts, around the clock." Then, in 1964, Chrysler terminated the program and decided to sell its parts only through dealerships. This was a turning point for Patrick: should he close his doors or reinvent the business? He chose to reinvent, and opened a Sunnyside Dodge dealership in McHenry, Illinois. What then looked like a simple solution appears visionary today. "At the time, McHenry was a podunk town," says Dan. "Now with how much that area's grown, the dealership does really well." It also kept the parts business going. Patrick continued to expand by buying the 300-acre Sunnyside Farm in nearby Woodstock. Still in the family, the property's barn now functions as another warehouse. Other businesses sprang from Patrick's Sunnyside vision, including Sunnyside Auto Finance, as well as several franchises.
Just about every member of the DeMichele family has worked for Sunnyside at one time or another. Dan's father, Leonard, still works part-time. Pursuing his father's interest, Leonard studied business at Northwestern University and at Lake Forest College. Dan began his journey as a music business major at Southern Illinois University. "Everyone in my family has always been musically inclined," says Dan. He has played the bass with a number of bands in Chicago, including in a band with his sister called Yahoo Thirst. Dan, as well as his sister and two older brothers also put in quite a bit of time at Sunnyside Parts Warehouse. "Working at Sunnyside was always my summer job during high school and college," says Dan. "When I reached a certain age, I decided to carry on the legacy and to see what I could do with the company." He switched to a general business major. He also filled different positions at Sunnyside Parts Warehouse to become familiar with how the business fit together. "I climbed the ranks and learned just about every job here," explains Dan. "Then I was in somewhat of a holding pattern until the General Manager retired. I decided that I was willing to make the career commitment and the life commitment to take over that job when he left." Since 2001, Dan has been Sunnyside's General Manager. He works side-by-side with his dad, running the day-to-day operations of the business while his dad manages its financial aspects.
Sunnyside 2.0, as Dan calls it, continues to evolve with the times. As General Manager, Dan is bringing fresh blood and new ideas to the company. "My first step was to modernize the office," recalls Dan. "I designed the new floorplan in AutoCAD to make sure it was a good use of space. I also wanted to keep the warehouse feel here." The main office is now a tidy, yet homey space with exposed brick and hardwood floors. Dan designed himself an office that's a shrine to the automotive. Sleek car art lines the walls, while the Sunnyside name glows in neon behind his desk. To increase efficiency, he configured an internal network that Sunnyside Parts Warehouse uses to manage its orders. When a salesperson takes an order, it's electronically transmitted to the parts pickers so that they can grab it and pack it up without delay. He assembled a lean and mean staff of about 20 people to take the orders. And he designed the retro-style Sunnyside Parts Warehouse logo.
The upgrades at Sunnyside Parts Warehouse go deeper than a redesigned office and logo, however. "We've introduced a new and improved business model here where we focus on high-level service. That's what we've found is most important to customers today. For being in an industry thought of as dusty and old, we've put in a lot of new technology to stay ahead of the curve." Some things won't be changing, however. Sunnyside Parts Warehouse will continue to stock parts for American car manufacturers. "Contrary to perceptions, the quality we're seeing from American manufacturers is just as good as for foreign manufacturers. It's a good time to be working with them," he explains. And you won't see Dan tooling around in a Toyota anytime soon. "I wouldn't drive a foreign car strictly from a loyalty point of view."
Like his dad and grandfather, Dan is carrying on the Sunnyside legacy with his business sense, dedication to caring for customers and his easy-going personality. "I was destined to be part of this business," says Dan. "I had the same fascination with cars as any pre-teen boy. Growing up, I had the same Lamborghini poster on my wall as everybody else. But being steeped in automotive culture for my whole life has helped me adapt to the idiosyncrasies of this industry." His love for cars is one of the reasons why Dan has helped run the Lincoln Square Chamber of Commerce Classic Car Show every summer for the past few years. Since last year, he has helped bring an expanded show to the CORUS Bank parking lot so that car enthusiasts would have more room to check out their fantasy vehicles. Dan considers himself lucky to be involved with something he loves on a daily basis. "Sunnyside Auto Parts is really a unique business," he says. "Not many people do what we do. Sunnyside is a standalone."
Sunnyside Parts Warehouse
2424 West Montrose Avenue
Chicago, IL 60618
773.267.8200
www.sunnysideco.com
Hours:
Monday - Friday 8am to 5pm
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