They smelled distinctive.
They came with an origin story that could not be manufactured in a marketing meeting because the story had actually happened.
Lana rarely used the word artisan.
She preferred functional.
She did not initially lean heavily on the word sustainable either.
Her marketing consisted mostly of a website she built herself and photographs posted to Houzz, which was becoming increasingly important for home-renovation professionals.
Her website said:
“A cedar closet is not a luxury. It is a tool. It protects what you store. It lasts longer than anything made of particle board. It smells like something real.”
She wrote those sentences at her kitchen table around eleven at night after a twelve-hour installation day.
They worked better than many professionally written advertising campaigns.
During the same period, Hank Sterling began doing what established businesses often do when a competitor they initially dismissed starts taking market share.
He watched.
Publicly, he said very little.
He still drank coffee at the co-op hardware store.
But the conversations around him were changing.
Contractors who had laughed beside Hank at Lana’s booth in 2010 were now asking one another whether they had seen the Dickstra closet in the Flanigan house.
Or the Harrington house.
Or the new build on Calhoun Street.
Whenever the subject reached Hank, his response was usually some variation of the same phrase.
“She found a niche. Good for her.”
The word niche was doing a lot of work.
Then came the summer of 2014.
That was the summer the argument largely ended.
Clothes moth activity became a much larger concern across parts of Middle Tennessee and the surrounding region after favorable weather conditions increased pest pressure.
Local homeowners began noticing damage to wool, cashmere, and stored natural-fiber clothing.
Local media discussed the problem.
Suddenly people who had spent years treating moth prevention as an old-fashioned concern became extremely interested in it.
Traditional wire shelving could not solve that problem.
Neither could laminated particle board.
Lana’s phone rang for weeks.
By then, she had a waiting list.
She employed Greta and two additional workers.
The shop was producing prefabricated cedar panels.
Musgrave’s supply agreement guaranteed access to raw material.
Most importantly, Dickstra Cedar Works had something no regional competitor could quickly reproduce.
A record.
Years of completed cedar closets already in homes.
Patricia Harrington, Lana’s first customer, spoke to a local newspaper.
She explained that after years with the cedar installation, she had not experienced the kind of moth damage she used to see in stored clothing.
The article ran on a Wednesday.
By Friday, Lana had received sixty-three new inquiries.
The 2014 financial numbers told the story more plainly than any advertisement could.
Dickstra Cedar Works, the name Lana had formally registered in 2012, generated approximately $312,000 in annual revenue.
Because the supply agreement kept raw-material costs unusually low, material remained only a small percentage of revenue.
Labor became the company’s largest cost.
Net margin for the year was approximately 31 percent.
Lana was 27.
Hank Sterling’s showroom closed in November 2014.