“What if I took them instead?” Lana asked.
Crowley studied her.
Then he said he would have to check with the main office.
Three weeks later, a forklift driver appeared with a pallet of scrap cedar and a clipboard.
Lana did not yet have a formal business plan.
She had a Craigslist listing.
A set of hand tools.
Eleven inquiries.
That was enough to begin.
The first inquiry that became a serious customer came from Patricia Harrington.
Patricia lived in a Victorian house on Depot Street in Shelbyville.
She owned an old cedar chest that had belonged to her grandmother and a closet containing wool clothing she was tired of finding damaged by moths.
Patricia found Lana’s listing while searching for cedar closet lining.
She emailed and asked whether Lana could build a complete cedar-lined closet.
Walls.
Ceiling.
Shelving.
Everything.
Lana said yes before fully working out how she was going to do it.
The closet was seven feet tall, four feet wide, and eight feet deep.
It had one existing shelf and a single clothes rod.
Lana measured the space three times.
At her kitchen table, she drew the design on graph paper.
Then she calculated how many irregular cedar pieces she would need.
Because the scrap varied in size, Lana developed an assembly pattern that turned variation into part of the appearance rather than treating it only as a defect.
Narrower pieces alternated with wider ones.
Differences in the slats created a warm striped pattern.
Lana charged Patricia $1,200.
Her purchased material cost was approximately $47 for fasteners, adhesive, and miscellaneous supplies.
The cedar itself had cost her nothing.
Patricia told two friends.
Those friends told others.
By the end of 2009, Lana had completed nine closet installations in Shelbyville and the surrounding county.
She had received another pallet from Musgrave.
And she had generated $11,400 in revenue from material the mill had previously paid to dispose of.
People in Shelbyville began hearing about her.
Not everybody reacted with admiration.
Some wanted to know who this 22-year-old woman thought she was.
Hank Sterling said almost exactly that in the spring of 2010.
Hank was 58 years old and had operated Sterling Home Solutions from a showroom on Madison Street for nineteen years.
He sold and installed closet systems, primarily laminated particle-board products purchased through a regional distributor in Nashville.
Hank had built his business through relationships.
He knew real estate agents across Bedford County.
He knew contractors flipping houses in Murfreesboro and Smyrna.
His showroom sign read:
BEDFORD COUNTY’S CLOSET EXPERT SINCE 1991.
For nineteen years, Hank had never faced a serious local competitor.
Every weekday morning, he held court at the counter of the co-op hardware store on Wartrace Pike.
He drank coffee with contractors, agents, and whoever else came through.