The company developed three product lines: a standard installation line for residential closets, a premium line that included custom shelving configurations and built-in cedar drawers, and a wholesale panel line that sold prefabricated cedar panels to contractors and custom home builders who wanted to offer cedar closets as an upgrade option. The wholesale line was the one that changed the scale of the business. Instead of being limited by how many installations her team could complete in a week, Lana was now selling product that other people installed in houses she would never visit in counties she had never driven through. The supply agreement with the Musgrave facility was expanded twice in 2016 and again in 2018.
And by 2018, the mill was delivering four times monthly and had assigned a specific staff member to manage the Dickstra account. Don Crowley, who retired in 2017, said at his retirement party that the Dickstra account had turned what had been a disposal problem into a line item that the mill's accountants actually looked forward to seeing on the monthly report. He said it in a toast. People laughed. It was a different kind of laugh than the one at the home and garden show in 2010.
The supply arrangement also attracted attention from the University of Tennessee's agricultural extension program which was studying regional wood waste utilization and from a graduate student in the forestry program named Tobias Johansson who wrote a case study on Dickstra Cedar Works as an example of what he called closed loop regional material recovery in small-scale manufacturing. Lana agreed to be interviewed for the case study on the condition that the graduate student spend a full day in the workshop before asking her any questions. He did. The case study was published in a regional forestry journal in 2018 and was cited in a subsequent paper on sustainable wood product manufacturing.
Lana kept a copy of it in the workshop. She did not frame it or display it. She kept it in a manila folder in the filing cabinet next to the supply agreements and the tax records. By the end of 2019, Dickstra Cedar Works had annual revenue of $247,000 from installations and $189,000 from wholesale panel sales for a combined total just over $436,000. She had seven full-time employees and a roster of installation subcontractors across four counties.
Her material cost, still anchored by the Musgrave supply agreement, still kiln-dried eastern red cedar at a fraction of retail lumber prices, remained her most significant competitive advantage. And it had been that way for a decade. The pencil mill had been dumping cedar slat scrap on her line for 11 years, and she had built a quarter-million-dollar brand from it before anyone who had laughed at her booth in 2010 had fully reckoned with what they had dismissed. Let me tell you about the spring of 2020.
Because the pandemic changed almost everything about almost every business in America and Dickstra Cedar Works was not exempt from that. Installation work stopped in March when Tennessee issued its stay-at-home order. Lana's installation team was home. Her subcontractors were home. The workshop was running at reduced capacity with herself and Greta Salazar and one other employee.
All of them masked. All of them maintaining distance. All of them trying to figure out what the business looked like in a world where you could not send people into other people's homes to build things. The answer turned out to be different but not finished. The wholesale panel line, which did not require in-home installation, kept running.
Contractors who were working on new construction, which was considered essential in Tennessee and continued through most of the shutdown, continued to order cedar panels for the houses they were building. And something else happened, which Lana had not predicted, but which in retrospect made complete sense. People who were suddenly spending all of their time at home began to pay attention to their homes in ways they never had before. Closet organization became in the spring and summer of 2020 a subject of genuine national interest.
The internet was full of people reorganizing their closets. The internet was also full of people discovering for the first time that the wire shelving and particleboard systems they had been living with for years were inadequate in ways they had simply never had time to notice. Lana's website traffic tripled between March and June of 2020. Inquiries for installations to be scheduled when restrictions lifted came in faster than she could respond to them. She hired a part-time office manager to handle the inquiry volume.
She was 33 years old and had been running this business for 11 years and had never had a marketing budget. And her biggest challenge in the spring of 2020 was keeping up with demand that was arriving entirely on its own. The installation backlog that built up through the spring of 2020 carried the business through the summer and into the fall. And by the end of 2020, despite the lost months of installation work in the spring, annual revenue was $312,000, exactly matching the record year 2014, which had been driven by the moth outbreak.
The parallel was not lost on Lana. She mentioned it to her father on the phone in December. He said, "Two crises, same result." She said, "Different crises, same product." He said, "That's what I meant."
That was as close to philosophical as Garrett Dickstra typically got on the phone. Let me tell you about the moment in 2021 that the story had been building toward for 12 years. In February of 2021, the Musgrave Pencil Company announced that it was closing its Shelbyville processing facility. The announcement was brief and corporate in its language: consolidation of operations, efficiency improvements, relocation of certain production functions to another facility.
And it meant that the source of Lana's cedar supply, the supply agreement that had been the foundation of her cost structure for 12 years was going to end. The facility would close in September. The deliveries would stop. The four cents per board foot cedar that had made her margins possible was going away. She called Don Crowley, who was retired and living in Tullahoma, and told him.
He said, "I heard. I'm sorry, Lana." She said, "Don't be. Tell me where the cedar goes." What he meant was that the mill's cedar billet inventory, the raw material that the Shelbyville facility had been processing was being sold off.