How hard is it to name a division that accounts for 20% of your sales? The answer: it was dang tough!
The division I am referring to is our “Hardwood Components Division.”
When we initiated our marketing strategy three years ago, a main goal was to clearly identify who we are and what we do. With the help of our marketing team, we defined that we had seven distinct divisions:
- Sawmills and Kilns
- Lumber and Millwork
- Hardwood Components
- Architectural Wood Solutions
- Rolling Ridge Woods
- Forestry
- Logistics
The Hardwood Components division gave us naming fits from the very start! To me, naming a division that is responsible for more than 20% of your sales should be a fairly simple task for a talented group of marketing experts.
Boy, was I surprised by just how difficult that small project turned out to be.
Our marketing experts and an internal marketing team did a bang-up job of developing and presenting us with names and thoughts for this division. Some we considered were: Dimension Products; Hardwood Manufacturing ; Hardwood Products; Dimension and Panel Manufacturing; and Glue-up Division. Every one of those names fell short of telling the marketing story about what the Hardwood Components division does and can do. Not to mention that geographic location has a lot to do with how we refer to the processes.
To better understand our quandary, allow me to describe what this division does and why we chose to name the division “Hardwood Components.” It’s not the sexy or catchy marketing name I had hoped we would create. I was looking for a name that would instantly resonate with our current and future customers.
Early on we had identified this division as an up-and-comer, so getting more diverse sales for it was critical. Over the last 24 months, we have made significant human and financial capital expenditures in order to successfully increase our production capacity, efficiencies, and throughput. Getting the marketing right for this division is important to us.
One of the primary products this division manufactures is precision ripped staves manufactured from select hardwoods. These staves can be used directly in furniture or other wood products and can best be described as pieces of hardwood that have been optically scanned for yield and then ripped to a precise width to create a glue edge. The staves are then processed through a high-tech scanning system coupled to a high-speed Talon crosscut saw to eliminate customer defined product ‘defects’ before they are cut to uniform lengths. Under most circumstances these precision staves will be further processed into glued-up wood panels or posts at our facility.
Most people in the business know what moulder blanks and S4S are, but now we get into trying to describe what constitutes a “panel” or a “post”. In the hardwood industry a “panel” is manufactured by edge-gluing multiple staves together. They can be as small and simple as a 9-by-12 inch cutting board blank, a 5-by-20 inch drawer front, a 12-by-48 inch stair tread, a 30-by-48 inch table top, a 3-by-3-by-48 inch face-glued newel post part, 8-by-84 inch bed parts, or a 30-by-192 inch solid wood butcher block counter top. The finished thicknesses on the panels can range from five-eighths to two inches or more. Thicker products, like butcher blocks and posts, can be made by face-gluing the staves.
These panels and posts are manufactured on four of our glue clamps fed by an Opti-Match color scanner. This optical color and dimensional scanner ensures the staves produce a finished panel or post that meets the customer’s uniform color specifications with a minimum amount of waste. 
These panels or posts can be shipped as they come out of the glue clamps or further manufactured by precision end trimming and running through our moulders and shapers to achieve the customers’ specified dimensions and edges. They can then be shipped to one of our many strategic partners for additional CNC work or a finish application.
To further complicate our naming process, this division also uses the same machinery and lean processes to manufacture custom flooring, mouldings, moulder blanks, S4S, and many other custom furniture parts.
Now you can start to understand how we became perplexed when searching for a name to perfectly explain the division’s capabilities and radiate with future customers from coast to coast. Everyone in the industry calls this manufacturing process something different. A lot of our panels become part of very sophisticated designs and applications developed by architects and interior designers for retail shops and restaurants. We need to be confident these two groups know who we are and what we can do for them.
A couple of the basic tenants of marketing are:
- Make what you do instantly recognizable by the largest potential customer population as possible;
- Make it as easy as possible for this customer base to do business with you.
That’s why we chose to name this important division Hardwood Components. We are situated among the largest concentration of hardwood furniture manufacturers and retailers in the nation, so the manufacturing of hardwood components is a vital part of our business. We are very accomplished at making it easy for our customers to do business with us. We pride ourselves on customer service and the superior quality of our products. Our current goal is to cultivate the instant recognition of our product capabilities and to broadcast our message to potential customers coast to coast.
Wishing you all the best,
Bob Mapes
President
