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, resinous, unmistakable smell, is not incidental to its function. It is the function.
The aromatic oils in eastern red cedar, primarily cedrol and cedrene, 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 Motlow 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 chests between the 1920s and the 1970s, and 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 particleboard systems. The second was the kind sold under brand names like ClosetMaid 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 particleboard systems still trapped humidity, still encouraged mildew on stored woolens, and 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 miles 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 inches long, 3 1/2 inches wide, and 1/4 inch 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 woolens 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, 4 ft 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 alternated 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 22-year-old woman with a community college certificate and $40 in her checking account had found a way to turn a pencil mill's waste 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.