About Levy Home Entertainment
Levy Home Entertainment is the nation’s premier distributor of paperback and hardcover books to America’s finest retailers. Known in the industry as LHE or Levy, we are recognized as an innovator with unmatched ability to service mass merchants, warehouse clubs and drug/grocery accounts. With over 600 million in annual sales, Levy provides books and services surrounding books to, BJ’s Warehouse Clubs, KMart, Meijer, Rite Aid, ShopKo, Stop and Shop, Target, Toys R Us, Wal-Mart and others. Additionally, LHE supplies books and warehousing services for Wholesaler Source Interlinks customers including Albertsons, Kroger, Walgreens, Safeway and many others.
Levy offers an array of supply chain services for books; warehousing, picking and shipping to complex planograming of each retailers’ consumer book offering and full in store merchandising services. Founded in 1962 as an offshoot of the Chas levy Company, (see history), it has grown dramatically over the years, especially in the last 10.
As a book distributor, Levy Home Entertainment buys from over 300 different publishers, and then assorts books so that our retail customers have the best items to produce the greatest sales per square foot for their particular stores. Our suppliers include the premier publishers including:
Barrons |
Meredith |
Chronicle |
Merriam Webster |
D.K. |
Modern Publishing |
Dalmation |
Penguin |
Disney |
Penton |
Hachette |
Random House |
Harcourt |
Readers Digest |
Harlequin |
Scholastic |
Harper Collins |
Simon & Schuster |
Healtch Communications |
Sterling |
Houghtom Mifflin |
T.O.R. |
Kane Miller |
Thomas Nelson |
Kensington |
Wiley |
Learning Horizons |
Workman |
MacMillan |
Zondervan |
We pride ourselves on great customer service and our ability to provide superior service to both our retail customers and supplier partners. We are continuing to invest heavily in technology and an automation to drive continuous improvement internally at Levy, as well as improve our services to our supply chain partners. We have just recently installed a new demand planning inventory tool (DPR software from Manhattan Associates) which will allow better forecasting of needs among our wide variety of retailers, and we think will help us maintain better in stock positions within each of their stores.
Additionally, we are in the process of bringing to the market (already installed for some accounts) a new vendor managed inventory system designed especially to predict the need in each store for major bestsellers, based on actual results found in historical point of sale numbers. Designed and written in house, we are already seeing benefits in sales and sell through, and it will serve as the web-based platform for key critical supply chain reporting that both our retailer and supplier partners have requested.
In 2005, we leased a new 400,000 square foot facility in Romeoville, Illinois to increase our capacity, especially during the Christmas season. In 2007, we leased an additional building in Salem, Virginia to handle new business with BJ’s. Additional distribution facilities are in Hillside Illinois, Salem, Virginia and Clearfield Utah, bringing our total warehouse footage to over one million square feet and allowing us 2-day delivery to any retailer nationwide.
LHE employs a team of 16 buyers who have a combined 176 years of book buying experience, whose job it is to scour the market for new products and most importantly, provide assortment selection advice for our range of retailers. Supported by a suite of category management and data warehouse software tools and staff, our buyers and account executives are able to analyze and then translate knowledge into superior sales results.