Amazon unveils Gates logo; hiring underway for leadership, operations teams

With the hiring process in the initial stages for Amazon’s new fulfillment center on Manitou Road in Gates, the e-commerce giant has launched community outreach initiatives.

Students at the Neil Armstrong Elementary School in Gates recently helped choose the logo for Gates facility and members of the Amazon’s local operations team presented a $3,000 check to the school’s Parent Teach Association.

Amazon said creating a localized logo for new fulfillment centers has become a growing tradition within the company. The Gates emblem features a roaring lion and ROC1, with the words Respect-Own-Care. The lion pays homage to Rochester’s nickname as the Young Lion of the West from the early- to mid-1800s.

“We feel it’s very important to get to know our new neighbors in Gates and the greater Rochester community,” Shirley Tarabochia, general manager for Amazon’s Gates fulfilment center, said in a news release. “The students’ creative energy was very helpful in us landing on the right logo for our new site. We also hope that our donation will help fund the very important work done at Neil Armstrong Elementary for the students who are the bright future leaders of this community.”

Amazon hasn’t finalized a date for opening the $412 million facility in Gates, which will employ up to 1,000 people. The company told the County of Monroe Industrial Development Agency (COMIDA) in January that it was targeting a mid-third quarter christening, but it appears it will be later.

COMIDA requires periodic updates, since it provided $143 million in property, sales and mortgage recording tax exemptions for the project.

An Amazon spokesperson said no launch date has been set, but that the company is in the “early stages of hiring our leadership and operations team.”

The fulfillment center was to open in September 2022, but Amazon’s internal pause on expansion, coupled with supply chain issues, has kept the 2.6-million-square-foot facility dormant.

Amazon still hasn’t decided how, or if, it will use the 280,000-square-foot facility it built less than a mile away on Shepard Road in the town of Ogden. That $46.5 million project came with hiring requirements (100 full-time, 100 part-time jobs) in exchange for $17.3 million in tax incentives from COMIDA.

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