US-based homewares group Williams-Sonoma is expanding its local presence, signing its first direct lease for warehouse and distribution centre operations to support the business in the region.

Williams-Sonoma trades in Australia through 20 stores spread across New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia and Victoria.

The seven-year lease of the 16,755 square metre warehouse will create many construction and operational jobs over the next decade, according to Frasers Property Industrial’s northern region general manager Ian Barter.

“Western Sydney continues to attract major national and international retail brands,” Barter said.

The warehouse will be designed to achieve a 5-star Green Star rating from the Green Building Council of Australia, and will incorporate solar PV and battery storage to achieve carbon neutral certification, while using a bio-diesel generation back up. It will be completed in mid-2021.

The lease comes after months of international supply chain disruptions for many global businesses, and could very well be part of a movement to create more localised supply chains in the event of further global disruptions – a likely outcome of the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to a report in Nature, epidemiologists around the world constructing short- and long-term projections of the Covid-19 pandemic largely agree that the virus is here to stay, and that sporadic lockdowns over the next several years are very possible.

The impact of more common and intermittent lockdowns across the world could be somewhat mitigated by smaller, more contained supply chains: if a business trades across multiple countries where one is locked down, the rest can continue to trade independently and stock will not necessarily see the shortages experienced during the beginning of the pandemic.