These were not unreasonable questions. They were the questions people ask when they want to appear helpful while actually communicating 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 Murfreesboro 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 Murfreesboro, 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 finish carpentry for a contractor in Murfreesboro 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 feet, 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 Musgrave facility, watching this operation grow, renegotiated the supply agreement in 2013. The new terms were that 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 mill scrap 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 Houzz, 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 particleboard. 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. Sterling 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 Dickstra 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.