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Miamisburg To Lose Dozens Of Jobs Under Evenflo Parent Company Restructuring

Evenflo is one of Miamisburg's largest employers.
Credit City of Miamisburg Municipal Government Facebook page
Evenflo is one of Miamisburg's largest employers.

Baby-product company Evenflo has announced dozens of jobs will be leaving Miamisburg. The changes were announced earlier in the week as part of Evenflo’s parent company Goodbaby North America’s  corporate restructuring.

Under the plan, the company’s headquarters will relocate to Boston and eliminate roughly 60 jobs in Miamisburg within the next year.

Officials say the move will begin in the summer of 2018 and is expected to be completed by the first quarter of 2019.

Miamisburg development manager Chris Fine says another 50 or 60 jobs are expected to remain in the city as part of a new operations center.

“It’s always concerning when one of your largest employers leaves or significantly downsizes," he says. "Fortunately, we have a pretty diverse economic base. We are able to withstand these bumps. We are somewhat worried about it but I think we’ll weather it just fine.”

Three years ago, the city secured a package of more than half a million dollars in incentives, including a forgivable loan of around $400,000 and another $175,000 in grant funds from Montgomery County's EDGE program to upgrade Evenflo’s facilities.

The funds were contingent on the company meeting agreed-upon hiring, payroll and other benchmarks. Fine says it’s too soon to know whether the company’s pending relocation would impact the status of that agreement.

“We understand the impact this move will have on all of our employees,” said Goodbaby North America CEO Jon Chamberlain in an emailed statement. "Each one will be given the opportunity to relocate or continue their jobs until the transition to Boston and Charlotte is complete.”

The company's restructuring also includes plans to create a new so-called Car Seat Center of Excellence in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Evenflo officials say its manufacturing facility in Piqua will continue operations.

Copyright 2018 WYSO

Jess Mador comes to WYSO from Knoxville NPR-station WUOT, where she created an interactive multimedia health storytelling project called TruckBeat, one of 15 projects around the country participating in AIR's Localore: #Finding Americainitiative. Before TruckBeat, Jess was an independent public radio journalist based in Minneapolis. She’s also worked as a staff reporter and producer at Minnesota Public Radio in the Twin Cities, and produced audio, video and web stories for a variety of other news outlets, including NPR News, APM, and PBS television stations. She has a Master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York. She loves making documentaries and telling stories at the intersection of journalism, digital and social media.