A Late Summer Update

Greetings Customers & Friends,

As we approach autumn, kids go back to school, families are home from their summer vacations, and our “normal” routines return. Parkerville expects our normal uptick in certain sectors of our business at this time of year. We’re looking forward to that, and we want to continue to offer the most unique collection of lumber to choose from when you visit our shop. As many of you know, we have a 7500 s.f. building on Brainard Pl. in Manchester where we primarily store, sort, tally, grade, and price lumber. All of this lumber comes from unconventional sources, meaning that it is not purchased through our everyday supply chain that Parkerville utilizes for majority of our stock. The sources vary, but the majority is from people who contact us, that have acquired the wood and usually have had it for an extended period of time. Typically, anywhere from a couple of years to decades. Every story is different when these folks call to sell their wood. Many times, it’s painful for them to see the wood go, but they’re almost always happy knowing that the wood will be utilized and conserved in some way and that most likely something beautiful will be made from it. The wood will find a good home. In other instances, it’s other woodworking or lumber companies going out of business and Parkerville buys their assets.

Growing a business is challenging in today’s age. PWP desperately needs more space, recruiting staff is difficult, fewer young people are entering the trades, and it feels like our expenses are constantly increasing at an uncomfortable rate. We want to have the capacity to show, or display more unique inventory (many are one-of-a-kind boards), and increase our everyday stock inventory, which would offer a better selection of lengths, widths, and thicknesses to you, our customers. Our facility on Brainard Pl. helps but we don’t have staff there most of the time and we can’t run big machinery there due to zoning restrictions. We opened the building for our customers on one Saturday last month and had a good day there. It was a wood tag sale of sorts where we sold small batches of wood, short runs of mouldings, live edge planks, and some unique interior exterior items that we don’t typically stock and sell cheap. For the remainder of this year, we plan to open it to the public there one Saturday in October, November, and December.

PWP continues to work on an expansion plan but it’s a long and slow process. We are committed to being a destination shop for artists, craftsmen, and contractors to see one of the most expansive collections of wood in the northeast. We are building the foundation of Parkerville to manage and sustain the increased business by implementing new operating software that is trade-specific for our industry and adding to our management and accounting staff.

We’ve recently had an opportunity that looked promising to add space to our operation that didn’t materialize. We also have a few other things we’re working on to alleviate our space constraints. We’ll keep you posted as we progress.

On our manufacturing side, we recently completed a large lecture hall in the newly renovated Dyson Center at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY. We have ongoing work at Yale, Trumpf in Farmington, CT, the American School for the Deaf in West Hartford, as well as several others. In addition to our space requirements for lumber sales, our needs are equal for our custom woodworking group. To grow, skilled project managers, draftspeople, programmers, and skilled builders are required. The demand is there with our existing clients to sustain significant growth.

In closing, I’m tempted to develop a short survey to gauge our valued customer’s opinion on a few things such as:

Would you like us to stay open 1 day a month at our Brainard Pl. location?

What products or services would you like to see us provide that we currently do not?

What can we do to better serve you?

Would you like to see more educational opportunities or demonstrations?

Let us know your ideas.

Our doors, eyes, and ears are always wide open to new ideas, questions, requests, compliments and constructive criticism. It helps us to better serve you.

I hope to see you at the shop.

Sincerely,

David Harris, President

Parkerville Wood Products, Inc.