When leading an association, the highest duty is moving the industry to a place they don’t know they need to go. It’s far easier to continue the current path and accept the status quo than to take on all the costs and challenges of changing the popular but failing opinions of the “old boys club.” I’m not suggesting that you’re stuck in the past or unwilling to adapt—quite the opposite. You are hardworking leaders who have seen everything and know what to expect. You know your markets, you know your supply chain, and you know your business. No part of me thinks I know better. My job as the Executive Director of the NHLA is not to tell you what to do; it is to ask you tough questions so that we can root out the real issues and their root causes and move forward to a proper solution.
What needs to change, and how do we achieve it? What are the consequences of our decisions—both action and inaction? These are the questions we must answer. Asking the right questions led the NHLA to create a strong Strategic Plan last year, focused on “Growing and Stabilizing the Hardwood Industry.” Now, how do we move forward? What model should we follow? The softwood industry’s checkoff program isn’t a simple solution, and with most commodity prices down, we need better answers. The softwood industry is down, too, and they have a checkoff program, so clearly, that is not a simple solution for us to follow. Most commodities are down in price, which is not much help for us looking for answers. Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported, “The average price of luxury goods sold online in the U.S. increased 64% between 2019 and 2024…” (Ryan, 2024).
Is hardwood a commodity or a luxury? Of course, the answer is both. It is a commodity at the mill but a luxury when installed as a final product. That dichotomy leads me to the question I want to ask you about. How do you sell hardwood as a value-added commodity? We want a piece of the luxury end price, yet we are constantly short-selling ourselves. If you sell mill-run lumber, you lose value every time. If you sell green pallet cants, you lose value every time. If you sell proprietary grades, you lose value every time. If you don’t dry, rip, surface, thermally modify, mold, turn, glue, prefabricate, pressure treat, or add value some other way, you lose value every time. Someone else gets the value if you don’t sell flooring, decking, siding, boards, cabinets, millwork, moldings, beams, matting, mass timber, cribbing, fences, ties, furniture, or other finished wood products. Of course, you can’t do everything. You also need customers, and those customers will want to add value themselves. It might not make sense to build a table in rural Alabama and send it to New York City; it is much easier to send the wood to New York and build it close to the market. Yet it is cheaper to send the wood and the table back to China than to New York, which is halfway across the country. Do you see where I am going with this?
The NHLA is here to help grow and stabilize the hardwood industry. To do so, you need to question the hardwood market. Where can you grow? How can you get more money/value to stabilize the market? The NHLA will use your hard-earned money and dues to research, create, and diversify market opportunities. We ask the questions, and you tell us what is possible. The markets are out there; our competitors sell in them daily. We need to figure out how to sell hardwood as a value-added commodity. The NHLA asks you what, where, when, why, and how. Why knot answer some questions.
Reference
Ryan, C. (2024, February 9). Some luxury brands have priced themselves out of reach. The Wall Street Journal.
