Citizen Vinyl moves to Weaverville, expands vinyl pressing capacity

Citizen Vinyl has moved its record pressing operation from the old Asheville Citizen-Times building on O. Henry Avenue to a larger site at 179 Merrimon Avenue in Weaverville, a shift that adds two presses and gives the company room to keep growing.

The company said the relocation is designed to improve turnaround times, lower overhead and support long-term sustainability. That matters for a business that has built a rare niche in Buncombe County as North Carolina’s first vinyl record pressing facility, and one that says U.S. vinyl record sales reached $1 billion in 2025.

Citizen Vinyl opened in October 2020 with one record press. It now says it operates three presses, including a semi-automatic LiteTone, a customized SMT Model 1500 and a 2022 computerized fully automatic press. By acquiring the equipment assets of Donaldson Record Pressing, which previously operated at the Weaverville site, the company added two more presses to its operation and expanded the amount of vinyl it can turn out without changing its core business.

For customers, the move should mean more capacity and faster fulfillment. For the company, it shifts production away from a downtown building that had become a shared home for manufacturing, retail and events, and into a location better suited to the industrial demands of pressing records. Citizen Vinyl closed its downtown bar, café, event space and record and art store on April 30, 2025, after weak post-Helene sales, but kept studio and manufacturing operations open until the relocation.

The move also underscores a broader question in Asheville’s creative economy: where can small manufacturers still afford to operate? Downtown Asheville gave Citizen Vinyl visibility inside the 1938-1939 Citizen-Times building at 14 O. Henry Avenue, a landmark the company describes as Asheville’s finest example of Art Moderne design. But the physical demands of pressing records, and the need to scale up, appear to have pushed the business toward Weaverville, where space is more practical for equipment, production flow and future expansion.

Citizen Vinyl’s leadership team now includes Gar Ragland, Lauren Rash, Audra Gaiziunas, John Lenac, Brent Manning and Scott Crane, as the company balances manufacturing, brand-building and new music-industry partnerships. It has also said it is developing technology that connects vinyl records to digital content, a sign that the business is trying to pair analog product appeal with newer consumer habits.

The move leaves the old downtown space with a different future, but it also shows that one of Buncombe County’s most distinctive makers is not pulling back. It is scaling up, and it is doing it where the economics of small-scale manufacturing make the most sense.