For 12 Years, a Pencil Mill Dumped Cedar Slat Scrap Along Her Property Line, Assuming She Would Never Find a Use for It—But the Quiet Woman Kept Every Piece, and Eventually Turned the Discarded Wood Into a Thriving $250,000 Closet Brand

On a Tuesday morning in March of 2009, Lana Vandermir stood in the parking lot of the Muning Cedar Pencil Mill in Sock County, Wisconsin, and watched a dump truck back up to the edge of her property line and unload four tons of cedar slat scrap onto the ground she’d been trying to farm for 3 years. The driver didn’t stop to apologize.

He didn’t even slow down. He just raised the bed, let it fall, and drove away, leaving a pile of thin, fragrant, pale gold wood strips 8 ft high and 30 ft wide, sitting exactly where her fence used to be before the spring floods took it out. Lana was 22 years old. She had $40 in her checking account, a used pickup truck with a cracked windshield, and a notebook she carried everywhere that was already half full of ideas nobody had asked for.

 Let me tell you about Lana Vandermir, because you need to understand the woman before you can understand what she built. And what she built is the reason this story is still being told 15 years later. Lana grew up on the Vandermir family farm in Sock County, Wisconsin, a piece of ground her greatgrandfather had cleared in 1921 and that her grandfather had expanded to 280 acres before the farm crisis of the 1980s took most of it back.

 By the time Lana was born in 1986, her parents were farming 90 acres of riverbottom ground that flooded twice a decade and a hillside parcel that grew rocks better than it grew anything else. Her father, Garrett Vandermir, was a methodical, quiet man who farmed the way his father had farmed and his father before that. row crops on the flat ground, hay on the hill, a small herd of beef cattle that never quite paid for themselves, but that Garrett couldn’t bring himself to sell because his grandfather had started the herd, and it felt like a kind of

abandonment to let them go. He was not a man who asked questions about whether there was a better way. He was a man who got up at 5:00 in the morning and worked until dark and believed that consistency was its own kind of answer. Lana was not that kind of person. She had known it since she was 12 years old and started keeping the notebook.

 A spiralbound composition book she bought at the drugstore in Barabou with her own money and filled with observations, questions, sketches, and calculations that her teachers called creative. and her father called impractical and that her mother, a quiet woman named Ing, who read everything she could find and said very little about what she thought called necessary.

Lana went to the University of Wisconsin Madison on a partial scholarship and studied environmental science with a minor in materials engineering and in her junior year she took a seminar taught by a professor named Dr. Anelm Krueger, who specialized in sustainable material cycles, the science of what happens to industrial byproducts when nobody wants them, and what happens when somebody figures out they should. Dr.

Krueger had a phrase he used so often. His students put it on a mug they gave him at the end of the semester. The phrase was, “Waste is just a material that hasn’t found its purpose yet.” Lana wrote it down in her notebook. She underlined it twice. She came home to Sock County in 2007 with her degree, her notebook, now the fourth one in a series, and an idea her father didn’t know what to do with. The idea was this.

The Moon Singh Cedar Pencil Mill, which had operated 6 milesi from the Vandermir farm since 1954, produced roughly 40,000 board feet of cedar slat scrap per year. Thin strips of aromatic cedar cut from the billets used to make pencil casings, too narrow and irregular for any structural use, too fragrant and beautiful to simply burn, and too abundant to ignore.

The mill had been dumping this scrap for decades, sometimes burning it in a permitted waste pile, sometimes giving it away to anyone who would haul it, and sometimes, as Lana discovered when she started asking questions, simply leaving it in piles on whatever low value land was nearest the mill’s back fence, the Vandermir property line was, as it happened, exactly that.

 Her father listened to her explain this at the kitchen table on a Sunday evening in October of 2007. He listened the way he listened to everything without interrupting, without nodding, with his hands flat on the table and his eyes focused somewhere between her face and the window behind her.

 When she finished, he was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “I need to think about it.” which in Garrett Vandermir’s language meant he had already decided no, but was too decent a man to say it out loud before he’d slept on it. Lana’s mother, Eningga, cleared the dishes without a word. On her way past Lana’s chair, she set her hand briefly on her daughter’s shoulder.

 She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. Let me tell you about what Lana had actually figured out. Because the idea sounds simple until you understand the science behind it. And once you understand the science, it stops sounding simple and starts sounding obvious, which is exactly the kind of idea that makes the people who missed it the most uncomfortable.

 Aromatic red cedar, the species juniperis Virginiaiana, the same wood the Muning mill had been cutting into pencil slats since 1954, contains a compound called cedrol, a natural sysquitterene alcohol that acts as a powerful insect repellent, particularly against the clothes moth to Naola basicella, which is responsible for destroying an estimated $750 million worth of wool.

cashmere and natural fiber clothing in American homes every year. This is not folk wisdom. It is documented, peer-reviewed, and confirmed by entomologists at land grant universities going back to the 1930s. The cedar chest, the aromatic cedar hope chest that generations of Midwestern women filled with quilts and wedding linens, was not a sentimental tradition.

 It was functional chemistry. The cedrol in the wood vapor phase diffused into the enclosed airspace and killed moth larae on contact, protecting natural fibers without chemicals, without mothballs, without any intervention at all beyond the wood itself. The problem, as Lana had understood it since her seminar with Dr.

 Krueger was that the modern closet had replaced the cedar chest entirely. Closets were built from pine MDF wire shelving and particle board. They were painted and laminated and sealed, and they offered no protection whatsoever to the wool suits and cashmere sweaters and natural fiber garments that American households were buying in increasing quantities as the premium clothing market expanded through the 1990s and 2000s.

 Meanwhile, the pencil industry was generating tens of thousands of board feet of aromatic cedar slat scrap per year at mills across the country. wood that was already cut, already dried, already fragrant, and already being thrown away. Lana’s idea was to line closets with it. Not the whole closet, not the walls and floor and ceiling in some elaborate renovation, but modular cedar lining panels.

 Tongue and groove slat systems cut to standard closet dimensions. Sold directly to homeowners as a premium closet upgrade that could be installed in an afternoon without a contractor, without tools beyond a mallet and a tape measure and without any raw material cost beyond what it took to mill the scrap into uniform panels. The material was free.

 The mill was paying to get rid of it. The market was every homeowner in America who owned a wool coat and had ever found a moth hole in it. She had the unit economics written out in her notebook in pencil revised four times at a retail price of $180 for a standard reach in closet kit with material cost near zero and labor cost limited to milling and packaging.

 Her projected margin was 71%. She had field trial data from a study published by Kansas State University’s extension service in 2004 showing that cedar lined enclosures reduced moth larve populations by 94% compared to unlined enclosures. She had a survey she’d conducted herself by calling 200 homeowners in Dne and Sock counties and asking whether they’d experienced moth damage in the past 3 years.

 68% said yes and whether they’d be willing to pay $150 to $200 for a closet lining that prevented it. 61% of those said yes. She showed her father the notebook. He read it the way he read everything. Slowly, without expression, turning each page with the same deliberate care he used for everything. When he finished, he closed the notebook and set it on the table and looked at her.

 He said, “You can use the old equipment shed. Don’t let it interfere with haying season.” That was his yes. That was all the yes she got and it was enough. Let me tell you about the moment the story almost ended before it started. Because without that moment, you don’t understand why the rest of it mattered. In the spring of 2008, Lana had spent 7 months converting the equipment shed into a small milling operation.

 A used table saw she bought for $400 at an estate sale. A rudder table she built herself from plan she found in a woodworking magazine. A sander she borrowed from a neighbor and never quite returned. She had milled her first 200 panels from cedar scrap she’d hauled herself from the back of the Muning Mill property.

 Wood that was sitting in piles being rained on. and she had assembled her first 12 closet kits, packed them in cardboard boxes she’d sourced from a recycler in Madison, and driven them to three independent kitchen and bath showrooms in Sock County and Dayne County to ask if they’d carry them on consignment. Two of the three showrooms said no.

 The third, a place in Prairie Dusac called Heirloom Home, said they’d put two kits on the floor and see what happened. Both sold within 3 weeks. Heirloom Home called, and asked for eight more. Lana mil them, delivered them, and used the $360 in proceeds to buy a better router bit and a box of business cards.

 That was when she drove to the Muning Mill to ask if she could formalize an arrangement, a regular supply of cedar slat scrap in exchange for hauling it away at no cost to the mill, which would save them the disposal fees they were currently paying. She had a one-page proposal. She had practiced what she was going to say. She had her notebook.

The mill manager was a man named Chuck Severt. Chuck Sever had managed the Muning Mill for 19 years and had the particular confidence of a man who had never been surprised by anything in his professional life and intended to keep it that way. He was in his mid50s with a gray mustache and the kind of handshake that was slightly too firm in a way that was meant to tell you something.

He read Lana’s one-page proposal with the expression of a man reading a menu in a language he doesn’t speak. And when he finished, he set it down on his desk and looked at her over the top of it. He said, “You want me to give you my scrap wood so you can sell it back to people as a closet product?” Lana said, “Yes, that was the idea, and that the arrangement would save him approximately $4,000 per year in disposal costs.

Chuck Severt leaned back in his chair. He looked at the ceiling for a moment. Then he looked back at her and he smiled. Not a warm smile, but the kind of smile that’s really a different kind of dismissal. The kind that says, “I’m being patient with you because I’m a reasonable man and not because I think you have a point.

” He said, “I appreciate the creativity. I really do. But I’ve got three guys who want that scrap for firewood and they haul it for free and I’m not going to complicate my operation for a college project. He said college project. Lana was 21 years old and had been out of college for a year. She did not correct him.

 She drove home on County Road C with her hands at 10 and two and her jaw set and she pulled into the farm and sat in the truck for a few minutes before she went inside. Her father was in the barn. Her mother was at the kitchen table with a book. Lana sat down across from her and told her what had happened. All of it, including the part about college project.

 And when she finished, her mother closed her book and looked at her for a moment and said, “So, you’ll use what’s already on the property line.” There were at that point approximately 2 tons of cedar slat scrap sitting on or near the Vandermir property line from previous dump runs. Lana had not yet processed it because she’d been waiting to secure a formal supply arrangement.

Her mother’s point was that she didn’t need one. She had the wood. She had the shed. She had the saw and the router and the sander. She had 12 kits already sold. She had a customer asking for more. She started milling the next morning. And then in March of 2009, the dump truck came and left four more tons. Let me tell you about what happened after that because the story doesn’t end with a dump truck and it doesn’t end with a parking lot.

 And if you think you know where it’s going, you’re probably right about the destination, but wrong about the road. Lana did not go back to Chuck Sever’s office. She did not write him a letter. What she did was spend 3 days with her notebook calculating exactly how many closet kits she could mill from four tons of cedar slat scrap.

What those kits would retail for and how long it would take her to sell them through the channels she already had. The answer when she finished was 340 kits at an average retail price of $180, which was $61,200 in revenue from wood that had been dumped on her property line by a man who had called her idea a college project.

She wrote that number at the top of a fresh page in her notebook and underlined it once. Then she called heirloom home in Prairie Dac and asked if they could take 20 kits a month. They said they’d try 10. She called two more kitchen and bath showrooms in Madison. One said no. One said, “Bring us six and we’ll see.

” She drove to a home improvement trade show in Milwaukee with four kits in the back of her truck and set up a table she’d borrowed from her church and spent two days talking to anyone who stopped. And she came home with 14 orders and two conversations with regional distributors who said they’d heard of her, which was not true, but she wrote their names down anyway.

By the end of 2009, Lana had sold 94 kits through four retail accounts and two direct sales, generating $16,920 in revenue. Her material cost was essentially zero. Her operating costs, saw blades, router bits, sandpaper, cardboard, gas, came to $2,340. She had cleared $14,580 in her first real year, working out of a converted equipment shed on a 90 acre farm in Sock County, Wisconsin, using wood that a pencil mill was paying to throw away.

 Her father looked at the numbers at the end of the year. He said, “That’s not bad.” In Garrett Vandermir’s language, that meant he was impressed and didn’t know how to say it. Let me tell you about the years that followed, because this is where the story stops being about one woman in a shed and starts being about something larger.

 And the larger thing is what the story is really about. In 2010, Lana hired her first employee, a neighbor’s son named Marcus Johansson, 19 years old, who needed work and had good hands and didn’t ask too many questions. She taught him to run the table saw and the router table and to sand the panels to the finish specification she’d developed, which was 150 grit followed by 220 grit.

 No sealer, because sealer would lock in the sedrol and kill the insect repellent properties that were the entire reason anyone was buying the product. She wrote the specification on a card and taped it to the wall above the sander. It stayed there for 6 years. In 2011, she redesigned the kit packaging. She hired a graphic designer from Madison named Petra Olifson who charged her $800 for a logo and a label.

And the logo was simple, a cedar sprig, a closet outline, a clean sif type face, and the label said Vandermir Cedar and listed the products properties. aromatic, natural, moth repelling, sustainably sourced from Wisconsin mill byproduct. That last phrase, sustainably sourced from Wisconsin mill byproduct, turned out to be the most important four words on the label because it was 2011 and the premium homegoods market was beginning to care very much about where things came from and what happened to the material that didn’t get used. and

Lana had without planning it as a marketing strategy built her entire on a Tuesday morning in March of 2009. Lana Dickstra stood in the parking lot of the Musgrave Pencil Company’s secondary processing facility in Shelbyville, Tennessee, and watched a forklift driver she’d never met before back a pallet of cedar slat scrap toward the rear gate of her property.

 She had not ordered it. She had not paid for it. The driver had a clipboard with her address on it and a signature line that someone at the mill had already signed on her behalf, and he looked at her the way people look at someone they expect to be grateful. And she was, though not in the way he expected.

 The slats were rough cut, irregular, some of them split along the grain, most of them too short for any conventional use, all of them smelling like the inside of a cedar chest that had been stored in a forest. She was 22 years old. She had $40 in her checking account and a Craigslist listing for a closet organizer she’d built from scrap pine that had received 11 inquiries in 4 days.

She looked at the pallet. She looked at the driver. She said, “Where do you want me to sign?” That was the beginning. Let me tell you what came before it because you need to understand Lana before you can understand what she built. Let me tell you about Shelbyville, Tennessee in the early 2000s because the town matters as much as the woman.

Shelbyville sits in Bedford County in the rolling limestone country between Nashville and Chattanooga. And in that era, it was a town organized around several things. The Tennessee walking horse industry, which brought trainers and buyers through every summer, and a cluster of light manufacturing operations that had survived the decad’s industrial contraction by specializing in things that couldn’t easily be shipped overseas.

The Musgrave Pencil Company was one of those operations. It had been making pencils in Shelbyville since 1906 and it used Eastern Red Cedar, Junip Paris, Virginiaiana almost exclusively because Eastern red cedar produces a wood that sharpens cleanly, holds a point, and smells like something a child remembers.

The mill processed thousands of board feet of cedar every week. And like every mill that processes wood at volume, it generated waste, slabs, end cuts, irregular pieces, splits. The kind of material that accountants call a disposal problem and that certain people, if they are paying attention, call a resource.

Lana Dickstra had been paying attention since she was 14. Let me tell you about Lana because she is the reason this story exists and she is different from almost every character this channel has told you about before. She was not an oldtimer with 50 years of accumulated mechanical knowledge. She was not a farmer’s son with a grandfather’s machine in the barn.

She was a 22-year-old woman with a community college certificate in interior design, a 400q ft rental house on the east side of Shelbyville, and a set of hand tools she had bought one at a time from the estate sales that ran every weekend in Bedford County. Her father, Garrett Dickstra, had farmed soybeans on 280 acres in Harden 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 a methodical man, careful with money, suspicious of anything that looked like a shortcut, and he had watched his daughter buy those hand tools with the particular expression of a man who has decided to say nothing and wait to see what happens. Her mother, Anna Lisa, had said she’s right, you know.

 One evening, after Lana had shown them her Craigslist listing, Garrett had set down his fork. He had looked at the listing on the laptop his daughter held toward him. He had said, “I need to think about it.” That was the most encouragement Lana had received from anyone in her family, and she had taken it.

 What Lana knew at 22 that almost nobody around her knew was this. Eastern red cedar is not a furniture wood in the conventional sense. It is not used for tables or chairs or cabinets in the way that oak or cherry or walnut are used because it is too soft, too variable, too prone to checking. But it is extraordinarily resistant to insects. It repels moths.

It absorbs moisture. It stabilizes humidity in enclosed spaces. It has been used in closets and chests and wardrobes for centuries precisely because of these properties. And the smell, that sharp, reinous, unmistakable smell, is not incidental to its function. It is the function. The aromatic oils in eastern red cedar, primarily cedral and cedren, are what drive the moths away.

 And those oils persist in the wood for decades if the surface is occasionally sanded or scored to expose fresh grain. Lana had learned this from a professor named Dr. Wanda Okafor at Montlo State Community College who taught a materials course that most of Lana’s classmates found tedious and Lana found transformative. Dr.

 Okafor had assigned a paper on historic uses of domestic wood species and Lana had spent three weeks in the college library reading about cedar chests about the Lane Company of Alta Vista, Virginia, which had sold millions of cedar chest between the 1920s and the 1970s about the specific cellular structure of eastern red cedar that made it behave the way it did.

 She had written 31 pages when the assignment called for 10. Dr. Okafor had given her an A and a note that said, “This is more than I asked for. It is also better than I expected. Keep going.” Let me tell you about the science because the science is what separated Lana from everyone who came before her in this particular market. The closet organization industry in 2009 was dominated by two types of products.

The first was wire shelving, the kind sold at every home improvement store in America. Inexpensive, adjustable, and universally despised by anyone who had ever watched a sweater slide through the gaps or a shoe rack collapse under real weight. The second was laminated particle board systems. The kind sold under brand names like Closet Made and Rubbermaid and a dozen regional competitors.

 Made from compressed wood fiber and covered in a thin layer of melamine or vinyl that looked clean in a showroom and began peeling within 3 years of installation. Both categories shared a fundamental problem. They were designed to organize space, but they did nothing for the space itself. A closet full of wire shelving still smelled like a closet.

 A closet full of particle board systems still trapped humidity still encouraged mildew on stored woolins still provided no protection against the insects that could destroy a season’s worth of stored clothing in a single summer. Lana’s research told her that a closet lined with eastern red cedar walls, shelving, floor functioned as a preservation environment, not just a storage environment.

The distinction was not cosmetic. It was functional. And the material to build it in Shelbyville, Tennessee in 2009 was being generated as waste by a pencil mill 3 mi from her house. The slat scrap that the Musgrave facility produced was a byproduct of their slat milling process. Pencil slats are thin, precisely dimensioned pieces of cedar, typically about 7 in long and 3 1/2 in wide and a/4 in thick, cut from larger cedar billets, and then kiln dried before being grooved and paired to form pencil blanks.

The irregular pieces, the ones that were too wide, too narrow, too short, or split along the edge, were sorted out before the slats went to the pencil making line. In 2008, Lana had approached the facility manager, a man named Don Crowley, and asked what happened to the irregular slats. Crowley had told her they were either chipped for mulch or landfilled and that the disposal cost the company approximately $8,000 a year in hauling fees.

 Lana had looked at him and said, “What if I took them instead?” Crowley had looked at her the way people look at someone who has said something they find slightly bewildering. And then he had said he’d have to check with the main office in Shelbyville. And then 3 weeks later, a forklift driver had appeared in her parking lot with a pallet of cedar slat scrap and a clipboard.

She did not have a business plan. She had a Craigslist listing, a set of hand tools, and 11 inquiries. That was enough to start. Let me tell you about the first closet she built because it is where the story really begins. The inquiry that became her first customer was from a woman named Patricia Harrington who lived in a Victorian house on Depot Street in Shelbyville and who had a cedar chest that had belonged to her grandmother and a closet full of woolins that she was losing to moths every summer. Patricia

had found Lana’s listing while searching for Cedar Closet lining and had emailed to ask whether Lana could do a full closet. Walls, ceiling, shelving, everything. Lana had said yes before she had fully worked out how she was going to do it. The closet was 7 ft tall, 4t wide, and 8 ft deep.

 It had one existing shelf and a single rod. Lana measured it three times. She sketched the design on graph paper at her kitchen table. She calculated how many slat pieces she would need, accounting for the irregular dimensions of the scrap. And she designed a tongue and groove assembly system that used the variability of the scrap as a design feature rather than a problem.

 Narrow pieces alternating with wider ones. the variation in width creating a horizontal striping effect that looked intentional and warm. She charged Patricia Harrington $1,200 for the installation. Her material cost was $47 in fasteners and adhesive. The cedar was free. Patricia Harrington told two friends. Those two friends told four more.

 By the end of 2009, Lana had completed nine closet installations in Shelbyville and the surrounding county, had received a second pallet delivery from the Musgrave facility, and had made $11,400 in revenue from a material that the pencil mill was paying to dispose of. Now, let me pause here and ask you something. When you hear that a 22year-old woman with a community college certificate and $40 in her checking account had found a way to turn a pencil mills waist stream into a functional product that people were paying real money for. What is the first

thing you want to know? I’ll tell you what the people in Shelbyville wanted to know. They wanted to know who she thought she was. That is not a metaphor. That is almost exactly what Hank Sterling said to her in the spring of 2010. Let me tell you about Hank Sterling because you need to understand him to understand what happened next.

 Hank Sterling was 58 years old in 2010 and had operated Sterling Home Solutions out of a showroom on Madison Street in Shelbyville for 19 years. He sold and installed closet systems, primarily the laminated particle board variety, sourced from a regional distributor in Nashville. And he had built his business on relationships.

 He knew every real estate agent in Bedford County. He knew the contractors who flipped houses in Murreey’sboro and Smyrna. He had a sign on his showroom that said Bedford County’s closet expert since 1991. And he had never in 19 years had a serious competitor operating out of the same town. Sterling held court every weekday morning at the counter of the co-op hardware store on Wart Trace Pike, where he drank coffee and talked to contractors and real estate agents and anyone else who came through.

 and he was the kind of man who made his opinions known without being asked for them. He had heard about Lana Dickstra through the contractor network before he had ever met her, and what he had heard had made him curious in the way that a large dog becomes curious about something small moving in the grass.

 He met her at a home and garden show at the Bedford County Fairgrounds in April of 2010, where Lana had rented a 10-foot booth with money she did not quite have and displayed photographs of her completed closets and a sample panel of the cedar slat assembly she had developed. Sterling walked past her booth twice before stopping.

 He looked at the photographs. He looked at the sample panel. He looked at Lana, who was 23 years old and wearing a flannel shirt and had a notebook open on the table in front of her with measurements and cost calculations written in columns. He said, “This is cute. What do you charge?” She told him. He made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a cough and said, “Honey, I’ve been doing closets in this county for 20 years.

 You know what people actually want? They want something that looks clean and goes in fast. You’re selling them a craft project. The silence lasted about 2 seconds. Then Sterling started laughing. And the two contractors standing with him laughed as well, and Lana wrote something in her notebook and did not look up.

Let me tell you about that laugh because it tells you everything about what Hank Sterling was protecting. It was not the laugh of a man who had examined the evidence and found it wanting. It was the laugh of a man who had built a comfortable position over 19 years and had learned to use laughter as a tool for keeping that position comfortable.

When Sterling laughed at Lana’s booth, he was not assessing her product. He was signaling to the contractors standing with him that her product did not need to be assessed. That is  a different thing entirely. A man who laughs because something is genuinely inferior has done the work of evaluation.

A man who laughs to avoid doing the work of evaluation is a man who is on some level afraid of what the evaluation might find. Lana understood this. She wrote it in her notebook in slightly different words. She drove home and called her mother. Her mother said, “She’s right.” You know, meaning herself, meaning the things she’d said at the kitchen table a year earlier.

 Her father said nothing, but he was listening. Lana did not change what she was doing. She expanded it. In the summer of 2010, she approached Don Crowley at the Musgrave facility again and asked whether the arrangement could be formalized, a written agreement, regular delivery schedule, a small payment to the mill in exchange for a guaranteed supply.

 Crowley brought it to the main office. The main office, which was spending $8,000 a year on disposal costs for material that Lana was now using productively, agreed within a week. The arrangement they reached was this. The mill would deliver scrap slats to Lana’s property twice monthly. Lana would pay the mill $100 per delivery as a handling fee.

 The mill would save approximately $6,000 a year in net disposal costs. Lana would have a guaranteed supply of kiln dried eastern red cedar at an effective cost of roughly 4 cents per board foot compared to the retail price of eastern red cedar lumber which in 2010 was running between $2 and $3 per board foot. That is not a small advantage.

 That is the kind of cost structure that makes a business possible when nothing else about it is easy. Let me tell you about the year 2011 because that is when the numbers started to tell a story that was hard to argue with even if people were still trying. By the end of 2011, Lana had completed 47 closet installations across Bedford County and the adjacent counties, Rutherford, Coffee, Marshall, Lincoln.

Her average job revenue was $1,850. Her average material cost, including fasteners, adhesive, and the cedar supply fee, was $118. Her tool investment had grown from the original estate sale hand tools to include a table saw, a router, and a pneumatic nailer. Purchased used total investment $2,200. Her gross revenue for 2011 was $86,950.

Her net, after materials, tools, fuel, and the booth rental at two home shows, was $61,400. She was 24 years old and working alone out of a rented house with a cargo trailer she had bought for $800. Hank Sterland’s showroom on Madison Street was still there. His sign still said Bedford County’s closet experts since 1991.

His laminated particle board systems were still being installed in houses across the county. But three of the real estate agents who had been sending him referrals had started sending some of those referrals to Lana instead because their clients were asking specifically for cedar and Sterling didn’t do cedar.

The community reaction to Lana’s growing business was not hostility exactly. It was something more like persistent skepticism delivered in a tone of friendly concern. At the co-op hardware store where Lana now came regularly for fasteners and adhesive, she heard things like, “You know, cedar is going to be hard to keep consistent.

” And how are you going to scale that if you’re doing everything by hand? and what happens when the mill changes its mind about the scrap deal? These were not unreasonable questions. They were the questions that people ask when they want to appear helpful while actually communicate in doubt.

 Lana answered them the same way every time, which was directly and with numbers. And then she bought her fasteners and left. Her father drove down from where the family had settled in Murreey’sboro in the fall of 2011 to see one of her finished closets. The homeowner, a retired school teacher named Margaret Flanigan, walked them through the installation.

 The cedar lined walls, the adjustable shelving, the way the smell hit you when you opened the door, warm and sharp and clean. Garrett Dickstra stood in the closet doorway for a long moment. He ran his hand along the wall. He looked at the corner joinery. He said nothing for long enough that Margaret Flanigan began to look slightly concerned.

 Then he said, “You did this yourself.” It was not a question. Lana said yes. He said all of it. She said yes. He nodded once slowly, the way a man nods when he is updating an internal calculation he has been running for some time, and they drove back to Murreey’sboro, mostly in silence. And somewhere on Route 41A, he said, “What do you need?” She told him, he said, “I’ll think about it.

” Two weeks later, he showed up at her house with a check for $4,000 and the name of an accountant in Shelbyville who he said was honest and not expensive. That was the most important investment in the history of what became Dickstra Cedar Works. Let me tell you about 2012 and 2013 because those are the years when the argument stopped being about whether Lana’s approach worked and started being about whether anyone was willing to admit it.

 In 2012, Lana hired her first employee, a woman named Greta Salazar, who had been doing Finnish carpentry for a contractor in Murreey’sboro and who had heard about Lana through the contractor network and called to ask if there was work. There was. Greta was 31, precise with a router, and had the particular quality of someone who takes craftsmanship personally.

 With two people working, their installation capacity doubled. Revenue for 2012 came in at $194,000. In 2013, Lana rented a proper workshop space, a former auto body shop on Elm Street in Shelbyville, 3,200 square ft, and began prefabricating closet components in panels rather than building everything on site. This was the shift that changed the business model.

 Instead of spending two days in a customer’s home fitting irregular slat pieces one at a time, they could now produce standardized panels in the shop, bring them to the site, and install a complete closet in 4 to 6 hours. Quality improved, installation time dropped by 60%. The effective cost per job fell, revenue per day went up.

 The Mosgrave facility, watching this operation grow, renegotiated the supply agreement in 2013. The new terms, Lana would pay $200 per delivery, still twice monthly, and the mill would guarantee a minimum volume. The mill was also by this point beginning to sort the scrap more carefully before delivery, separating the better pieces from the truly unusable, which was itself a form of recognition that the material had value.

Don Crowley, who had been the facility manager since before Lana was born, said at the time that he’d never seen anyone find a real use for that material. He said it the way people say things when they are trying to sound neutral about something that is making them feel slightly foolish for not having thought of it themselves.

Now let me pause here and ask you something else. Do you know what was happening to the closet organization market in 2012 and 2013? The housing market was beginning its recovery from the 2008 collapse. New construction was picking up in the Nashville suburbs. Home renovation spending was climbing.

 And consumers who had spent four years making do with less were beginning to invest in their homes again with a specificity of intention that they hadn’t had in the boom years. They wanted things that were real, that were made of actual materials that would last. The word artisan was appearing in more and more home renovation contexts.

 The word sustainable was appearing even more. Lana’s product, handcrafted cedar closet systems built from reclaimed millcrap was not just a functional product. It was a story. And in 2012 and 2013, people were paying for stories. Lana did not use the word artisan. She used the word functional. She did not use the word sustainable in her marketing, which at this point consisted of a website she had built herself and a small presence on what was then a fairly new platform called Who’s where home renovation professionals posted

photographs of their work. What she said on her website was this. 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. That copy had been written at her kitchen table at 11:00 at night after a 12-hour installation day, and it converted at a rate that would have impressed a professional copywriter.

Hank Sterling during this period was doing what established businesses do when a competitor they initially dismissed begins to take market share. He was watching and saying nothing publicly. At the co-op hardware store, the morning conversations had shifted. Sterlin was still there, still drinking coffee.

 But the contractors, who had laughed at Lana’s booth in 2010, were now occasionally asking each other whether they’d seen the Dystra closet in the Flanigan House or the Harrington House or the new build on Calhoun Street. Sterling’s response when the subject came up was a version of the same thing. It’s a niche. She’s found a niche. Good for her.

 The word nichch was doing a lot of work in that sentence. Let me tell you about the summer of 2014 because that is when the argument ended. The summer of 2014 was the summer of the moth outbreak. This is not a dramatic metaphor. There was an actual documented regional increase in clothes moth activity across middle Tennessee and southern Kentucky in the summer of 2014.

Attributed by the University of Tennessee Extension Service to a combination of a mild winter and an unusually humid spring that created ideal breeding conditions for tinola basela. the webbing clothes moth, which is the species responsible for the holes in your grandmother’s sweaters. The outbreak was reported in the Shelbyville Times Gazette in July.

 It was the subject of a segment on a Nashville television news program in August and it produced in the homes of people across Bedford County and the surrounding region a sudden and urgent interest in moth prevention that the wire shelving and laminated particle board industry was completely unable to address. Lana’s phone rang for 3 weeks straight.

She had by this point a waiting list for installations. She had two employees in addition to Greta Salazar. She had a workshop full of prefabricated cedar panels. She had a supply agreement with the Musgrave facility that guaranteed her material. And she had crucially something that no competitor in the region had.

 a demonstrated track record of installed closets that had protected stored woolins through multiple seasons in a county where moths had just destroyed thousands of dollars of clothing and homes with conventional closet systems. Patricia Harrington, her first customer, gave an interview to the Times Gazette in which she said that she had not lost a single item of clothing to moths in 5 years of having the cedar closet.

 while her neighbor, who had a standard wire shelving system, had lost four sweaters and a cashmere coat in a single summer. That interview ran on a Wednesday. By Friday, Lana had received 63 new inquiries. The revenue numbers for 2014 told the story in the plainest possible language.

 Dickstra Cedar Works, she had registered the business name in 2012, generated $312,000 in revenue in 2014. Her material cost remained because of the mill supply agreement at roughly 6% of revenue. Her labor costs with four employees and herself were her largest expense. Her net margin for the year was 31%. She was 27 years old.

 Hank Sterling’s showroom on Madison Street closed in November of 2014. The sign came down on a Tuesday and Lana drove past it on her way to an installation in Wart Trace and did not stop. She had not planned to stop. She had not been waiting for the sign to come down. She had been too busy to think about Hank Sterling for most of the year, but she noticed it and she thought about the home and garden show in 2010.

And she thought about the laugh and she thought about what the laugh had been protecting and she drove on. Let me tell you about what happened in the spring of 2015. Because the story doesn’t end with a sign coming down. Hank Sterling came to the workshop on Elm Street on a Thursday morning in March of 2015.

He drove a pickup truck that had seen better days, which was itself a change from the late model Silverado he’d been driving in 2010. He knocked on the workshop door. Greta Salazar answered it and came to find Lana who was at the table saw breaking down a panel. Lana turned off the saw. She took off her safety glasses.

 She walked to the door. Sterling was standing in the parking lot with his hands in his jacket pockets looking at the building the way people look at things they are trying to assess without appearing to assess them. He said, “I heard you might be looking to take on some installation subcontractors.” He had heard this because it was true.

Lana had mentioned to two contractors that she was considering expanding her installation capacity. He said, “I’ve got 19 years of closet installation experience, and I know every house in this county.” He said it the way people say things when they are trying to make a proposal sound like an offer of mutual benefit rather than an application for help.

Lana looked at him for a moment. She said, “Do you remember the home and garden show in 2010?” Sterling said he did. She said, “You told me I was selling people a craft project.” Sterling said something about how he’d been speaking from experience at the time. Lanaeus said the lesson isn’t that cedar closets are better than particle board closets.

 The lesson is that any closet system that does only one thing, organized space is a closet system that needs only one problem to make it useless. Moths aren’t a one-time event. They come back. They’ll always come back. I built something that solves the problem instead of just organizing around it. Sterling was quiet for a moment.

 Then he said, “I know.” He said it simply without decoration. The way a man says something he has been carrying for a while and is relieved to put down. Lana said, “I’ll put you in touch with my operations manager.” She went back to the table saw. Greta showed Sterling out. He worked as an installation subcontractor for Dickstra Cedar Works for three years until he retired in 2018.

 He was by every account meticulous and professional, and he knew every house in Bedford County, which turned out to be genuinely useful. Let me tell you about what happened after 2015 because the story doesn’t end with a reconciliation in a parking lot either. Between 2015 and 2019, Dickstra Cedar Works expanded its geographic reach from Bedford County into the broader Nashville metropolitan market, which was in the middle of one of the most sustained residential construction booms in the region’s history. The company developed three

product lines. a standard installation line for residential closets, a premium line that included custom shelving configurations and built-in cedar drawers, and a wholesale panel line that sold prefabricated cedar panels to contractors and custom home builders who wanted to offer cedar closets as an upgrade option.

 The wholesale line was the one that changed the scale of the business. Instead of being limited by how many installations her team could complete in a week, Lana was now selling product that other people installed in houses she would never visit in counties she had never driven through. The supply agreement with the Musgrave facility was expanded twice in 2016 and again in 2018.

 And by 2018, the mill was delivering four times monthly and had assigned a specific staff member to manage the Dickstra account. Don Crowley, who retired in 2017, said at his retirement party that the Dickstra account had turned what had been a disposal problem into a line item that the Mills accountants actually looked forward to seeing on the monthly report. He said it in a toast.

 People laughed. It was a different kind of laugh than the one at the home and garden show in 2010. The supply arrangement also attracted attention from the University of Tennessee’s agricultural extension program which was studying regional wood waste utilization and from a graduate student in the forestry program named Tobias Johansson who wrote a case study on Dickstra cedar works as an example of what he called closed loop regional material recovery in smallcale manufacturing.

Lana agreed to be interviewed for the case study on the condition that the graduate student spend a full day in the workshop before asking her any questions. He did. The case study was published in a regional forestry journal in 2018 and was cited in a subsequent paper on sustainable wood product manufacturing.

Lana kept a copy of it in the workshop. She did not frame it or display it. She kept it in a manila folder in the filing cabinet next to the supply agreements and the tax records. By the end of 2019, Dickstra Cedar Works had annual revenue of $247,000 from installations and $189,000 from wholesale panel sales for a combined total just over $436,000.

She had seven full-time employees and a roster of installation subcontractors across four counties. Her material cost, still anchored by the Musgrave supply agreement, still kiln dried eastern red cedar at a fraction of retail lumber prices, remained her most significant competitive advantage.

 And it had been that way for a decade. The pencil mill had been dumping cedar slat scrap on her line for 11 years, and she had built a quarter million dollar brand from it before anyone who had laughed at her booth in 2010 had fully reckoned with what they had dismissed. Let me tell you about the spring of 2020.

 Because the pandemic changed almost everything about almost every business in America and Dickstra Cedar Works was not exempt from that. Installation work stopped in March when Tennessee issued its stay-at-home order. Lana’s installation team was home. Her subcontractors were home. The workshop was running at reduced capacity with herself and Greta Salazar and one other employee. All of them masked.

 All of them maintaining distance. All of them trying to figure out what the business looked like in a world where you could not send people into other people’s homes to build things. The answer turned out to be different but not finished. The wholesale panel line, which did not require in-home installation, kept running.

 Contractors who were working on new construction, which was considered essential in Tennessee and continued through most of the shutdown, continued to order cedar panels for the houses they were building. And something else happened, which Lana had not predicted, but which in retrospect made complete sense. People who were suddenly spending all of their time at home began to pay attention to their homes in ways they never had before.

 Closet organization became in the spring and summer of 2020 a subject of genuine national interest. The internet was full of people reorganizing their closets. The internet was also full of people discovering for the first time that the wire shelving and particle board systems they had been living with for years were inadequate in ways they had simply never had time to notice.

 Lana’s website traffic tripled between March and June of 2020. Inquiries for installations to be scheduled when restrictions lifted came in faster than she could respond to them. She hired a part-time office manager to handle the inquiry volume. She was 33 years old and had been running this business for 11 years and had never had a marketing budget.

 And her biggest challenge in the spring of 2020 was keeping up with demand that was arriving entirely on its own. The installation backlog that built up through the spring of 2020 carried the business through the summer and into the fall. And by the end of 2020, despite the lost months of installation work in the spring, annual revenue was $312,000, exactly matching the record year 2014, which had been driven by the moth outbreak.

 The parallel was not lost on Lana. She mentioned it to her father on the phone in December. He said, “Two crises, same result.” She said, “Different crises, same product.” He said, “That’s what I meant.” That was as close to philosophical as Garrett Dstra typically got on the phone. Let me tell you about the moment in 2021 that the story had been building toward for 12 years because it is the moment that explains the title of this video.

 In February of 2021, the Musgrave Pencil Company announced that it was closing its Shelbyville processing facility. The announcement was brief and corporate in its language. consolidation of operations, efficiency improvements, relocation of certain production functions to another facility. And it meant that the source of Lana’s cedar supply, the supply agreement that had been the foundation of her cost structure for 12 years was going to end.

 The facility would close in September. The deliveries would stop. The four cents per boardfoot cedar that had made her margins possible was going away. She called Don Crowley, who was retired and living in Tuloma, and told him. He said, “I heard. I’m sorry, Lana.” She said, “Don’t be.

 Tell me where the cedar goes.” He said what he meant was that the mills cedar billet inventory, the raw material that the Shelbyville facility had been processing was being sold Off.