Lana wrote the finishing specification on a card and taped it above the sander.
It stayed there for six years.
In 2011, she redesigned the packaging.
She hired a Madison graphic designer named Petra Olifson and paid $800 for a logo and label system.
The logo was simple.
A cedar sprig.
A closet outline.
A clean sans-serif typeface.
The label read VANDERMIR CEDAR and described the product as aromatic, naturally moth-deterring, and sustainably sourced from Wisconsin mill byproduct.
That final phrase became unexpectedly important.
It was 2011, and the premium home-goods market was beginning to care deeply about where products came from and what happened to manufacturing material that was not used.
Without originally intending to build a marketing identity around it, Lana had built the entire story of the business around something that had happened on a Tuesday morning in March 2009.
On a Tuesday morning in March of 2009, Lana Dickstra stood in the parking area beside the Musgrave Pencil Company’s secondary processing facility in Shelbyville, Tennessee, and watched a forklift driver she had never met back a pallet of cedar slat scrap toward the rear of her property.
She had not ordered it.
She had not paid for it.
The driver carried a clipboard with her address on it and a signature line that somebody at the mill had already completed.
He looked at Lana the way people look at somebody they expect to be grateful.
And she was grateful.
Just not for the reason he assumed.
The slats were rough cut and irregular.
Some were split along the grain.
Many were too short for conventional use.
Every piece smelled like the inside of an old cedar chest stored in a forest.
Lana was 22 years old.
She had $40 in her checking account and a Craigslist listing for a closet organizer she had built from scrap pine.
The listing had received eleven inquiries in four days.
She looked at the pallet.
Then she looked at the driver.
“Where do you want me to sign?”
That was the beginning.
To understand what came next, you have to understand both Lana and Shelbyville, Tennessee, in the late 2000s.
Shelbyville sits in Bedford County in the rolling limestone country south of Nashville.
At the time, the town revolved around several things, including the Tennessee Walking Horse industry and a cluster of light-manufacturing businesses that had survived decades of industrial contraction by specializing in products that were difficult to replace with overseas production.
The Musgrave Pencil Company was one of those businesses.
It had manufactured pencils in Shelbyville since 1916 and worked with cedar because cedar could be milled cleanly into the thin wooden components required for pencil production.
Like every wood-processing operation working at volume, the mill created waste.
Slabs.
End cuts.
Irregular pieces.
Splits.
Material that accountants called a disposal problem.
And material that certain people, if they paid attention, called a resource.
Lana Dickstra had been paying attention since she was fourteen.
She was not an old tradesman with fifty years of accumulated mechanical knowledge.
She was not the son of a farmer inheriting his grandfather’s machine shop.
She was a 22-year-old woman with a community-college certificate in interior design, a four-hundred-square-foot rental house on the east side of Shelbyville, and a collection of hand tools she had purchased one at a time at estate sales around Bedford County.
Her father, Garrett Dickstra, had farmed soybeans on 280 acres in Hardin County, Iowa, before a back injury in 2001 forced the family to sell and relocate to Tennessee, where his wife’s sister had work and a spare room.
Garrett was methodical.
Careful with money.