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 Severt'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. She calculated 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 du Sac 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 Sauk 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 cedrol 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 serif typeface, and the label said Vandermir Cedar and listed the product's 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 home-goods 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 business around what had happened 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.
Those included the Tennessee Walking Horse industry, which brought trainers and buyers through every summer, and a cluster of light manufacturing operations that had survived the decade'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, Juniperus virginiana, 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, and splits. It was 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 who came before her. 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 400 sq 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 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 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.