The word niche 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 Tineola bisselliella. 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 particleboard 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 woolens 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 Wartrace 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. Lana said the lesson isn't that cedar closets are better than particleboard closets. The lesson is that any closet system that does only one thing, organize 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.