With High Quality Specialty Products, Ready Pine Is Poised For Expansion
“With our distributors, if you build trust and confidence they will keep adding to the program, and eventually one day, hopefully, their entire warehouse is full of Ready Pine.”– Chris Martin, president and owner, Ready Pine
Ready Pine’s Pickled Pine is on the walls and ceiling in the interior of this lake house.
Offering high-quality products on a consistent basis has been the key to Ready Pine’s success over the past 20 years.
Established in 2006, Ready Pine offers pre-finished end-matched Engelmann Spruce-Lodgepole Pine (ESLP) paneling in a variety of colors in 5/8 thickness. Each panel is efficiently and expertly produced in a state-of-the-art facility located in Waterloo, ON.
Ready Pine offers two profiles, v-match and nickel gap, and two widths, 6-inch and 8-inch.
Originally the company’s program offered Eastern White Pine. Around 2012 when Chris Martin, president and owner, wanted to do end matching, he switched to ESLP, a western species grown in the Kootenay region of BC. “End matching is a very important part of our value proposition,” he said. “It’s nice, it’s intuitive, except once you use it, it’s more important than you thought.” Martin added that from an installation standpoint, the end-matched panels take only a quarter of the typical time.
Chris Martin, left, is the owner of Ready Pine, which offers pre-finished end-matched paneling in a variety of colors. With him is Connor Lund, a new Ready Pine salesperson who is helping to expand and open new branches.
Additionally, ESLP has an appealing look. “We really enjoy the color and the size of the knots, which are a strength in that species,” he said.
Ready Pine started with six colors and has expanded to 14.
The colors include a clear coat; Pickled Pine (whitewash); Seagull Grey, Bennington Grey, Beige Grey, Westcott Navy (greys); Golden Pecan, Ipswich Pine, Puritan Pine, Early American (natural wood stains); Autumn Pine, Mocha, Nightfall (dark stains); and Cloud White (opaque).
The greys were added in the 2010s and continue to be popular for interiors. In recent years, the business added the darker colors, commonly used for porch ceilings and soffits.
Half of Ready Pine’s sales are from Pickled Pine, which is a whitewashed color. The other top sellers include clear coat and Early American, a neutral brown stain.
Currently, Ready Pine is buying over a million board feet of raw substrate but expects that number to double next year. The company’s consistency in offering high quality products “opened us up to opportunities for growth,” said Martin. “We have capacities for growth. We have opportunities in our plant to produce more.”
Its products can be found coast to coast in Canada through distribution partners Nicholson & Cates, SBP and Richelieu Neos Gordonply.
This kitchen features Ready Pine’s Beige Grey color.
“We go through two-step distribution. First thing we try and find is the value-added building products wholesaler who carries inventory and who has a sales force that can promote Ready Pine through the lumber retail chain,” said Martin.
In the United States, Ready Pine began selling through WS Building Materials three years ago in Comstock Park, MI. In early 2026, it launched in four more WS branches in South Dakota, Wisconsin and Illinois.
“We’re very happy with the growth we’ve had, and I think Ready Pine is very profitable for our distributors,” said Martin.
Martin said the largest market for Ready Pine products is recreational properties, such as cabins, chalets, cottages and lake houses.
There’s also a market for Ready Pine in primary residences as outdoor living spaces.
The Seagull Grey color of Ready Pine gives this interior a lake house feel.
“Our colors can lend themselves to an urban environment,” said Martin. “There was a time when Pine was your grandmother’s basement. That time ended in the mid-2000s.”
The business is poised for expansion and looking to add more customers, although he noted, as long as new distributors are not competing with Ready Pine’s current clients.
Martin said he wants Ready Pine’s customers to be successful.
“The more money they can make the better it is for both of us,” he said. “So, it’s in our interest to have them profitable. Once we make the margin that we’ve set out corporately to require, we want them to make as much as they can.”
Ready Pine’s offerings equal 56 SKU’s. About five to 10 of those are 80 to 90 percent of the business’ sales.
The ceiling in this kitchen features Ready Pine’s Cloud White, which is an opaque white.
“What we ask our distributors to do is take a very small position, small inventory stocking,” Martin said. The distributor is asked to turn that inventory within four to six weeks. “While they are turning that inventory, they’re turning the heavy hitters, the 80 percent of the sales,” he explained. “But the ones that fall outside of that, the special orders, we now have a truck running to that branch every four to six weeks so we can add in special non-stocked orders.”
Martin said he has repeatedly seen distributors add more colors over time because of a demand in custom orders.
“With our distributors, if you build trust and confidence they will keep adding to the program, and eventually one day, hopefully, their entire warehouse is full of Ready Pine,” he said.
Martin has heavily invested in the technology at the Ready Pine factory to improve efficiencies and quality, including being current in all coating technologies and application, curing and quality control methods.
This porch ceiling features Pickled Pine.
To Martin, quality means consistency. “Consistency in color, consistency in texture, so that despite all the different batches we run, we’re the same,” he said.
The business has also invested in its sanding lines. “The first thing in making a good product is to sand it well. It’s the foundation of good coating. Our spray technology has been the same since day one, curing section, automation. One person feeds and another off-loads. Others just monitor the line for quality purposes.”
Ready Pine can produce 35,000 linear feet in a 10-hour shift.
“That’s from raw wood through to packaged material ready to ship,” Martin said.
The business’ inventory includes raw lumber and paint. “We do not process anything ahead of time,” Martin said. Ready Pine has the flexibility to quickly respond to a customer’s needs and produce any color, width or profile on the spot. He said there is no minimum order.
This cottage features two of Ready Pine’s colors on the ceiling. The first floor has Cloud White, and the second floor has Pickled Pine.
The Ready Pine team consists of 12 members. Troy Lawlor is the Operations Manager and has been with the business for about seven years. With prior experience in third party logistics, he is focused on lean manufacturing methods. Martin said Lawlor is a significant contributor to Ready Pine’s success.
“Our factory is very clean,” he said. “We have detailed standard operating procedures regarding machine operation, maintenance and health and safety. People are often impressed when they come to our factory to see a paint shop that doesn’t look like a paint shop.”
Ready Pine also has a new salesperson, Connor Lund, who is helping to expand and open new branches.
With good support in place, Martin is focusing on the business’ next evolution through new product development, such as exploring new colors, profiles, species, shapes and textures.
Early American Porch, seen on this porch ceiling, is one of Ready Pine’s most popular colors.
He has reached this growth phase in his career with Ready Pine after learning the lessons of dabbling in pre-finishing lumber from 2002 until 2006. “At that time, the business model was to pre-finish other people’s wood,” he said. He quickly learned that his business was only as busy as “the people who sent us the wood,” he recalled. “It was difficult to find work.”
Thus, in 2006, and armed with a new business model, Ready Pine launched and has thrived.
“Ultimately, we’re not in the pre-finishing of Pine business, although that’s very important. We’re actually in the interior wall décor business,” Martin said. “When people use our products, that’s what they’re buying, interior wall décor. They could buy wallpaper, stone, stucco, drywall, and they use Ready Pine.”
Ready Pine is a member of the North American Wholesale Lumber Association, and Martin is part of the Wood Manufacturing Cluster of Ontario.
For more information, visit readypine.com.
