For Lana, the arrangement transformed the economics.
At retail, good cedar lumber was expensive.
Her material originated from production waste that had already been dried and processed far enough to make it unusually useful for her purpose. She still had labor, machinery, transportation, sorting loss, packaging, blades, adhesives, insurance, and every other expense that appears when a supposedly “free” material becomes a real product.
But her raw-material advantage was substantial.
By the end of 2011, the numbers were becoming harder for people to dismiss. Lana had completed dozens of closet installations across several counties, with average jobs worth far more than her early experiments. She had invested in better used equipment—a table saw, router, pneumatic tools—and refined how pieces were cut and assembled. According to the source, her 2011 revenue reached $86,950, with a reported net of $61,400 after the listed direct operating expenses.
She was twenty-four.
Still working mostly alone.
Still hauling material.
Still hearing variations of the same concern.
What happens if the mill stops supplying you?
What happens when cedar becomes inconsistent?
How do you scale custom installations?
This time Lana did not resent the questions.
Some of them were correct.
The biggest weakness in her model was obvious: she had built a product around a material stream controlled by someone else.
The second weakness was labor.
A custom cedar closet might be profitable, but if every installation required Lana to spend two days fitting irregular slats inside somebody’s house, growth would stop when her calendar filled.
That problem led to the decision that turned a craft business into something more repeatable.
In 2012, she hired her first skilled employee, Greta Salazar.
Greta was precise with tools, serious about finish quality, and annoyed by sloppy joinery in a way Lana found immediately reassuring. With another pair of trained hands, installation capacity increased. The following year, Lana rented a former auto-body shop in Shelbyville and began prefabricating larger wall sections before arriving at customer homes.
That changed everything.
Instead of standing inside a closet fitting one narrow cedar slat after another, the team could process, sort, mill, and assemble components in controlled shop conditions. Installations that once consumed most of two days could increasingly be completed within hours.
Quality became more consistent.
Work sites became cleaner.
Revenue per installation day increased.
And for the first time, Lana could imagine selling the product without personally entering every home.
Hank Sterling noticed.
He did not say much publicly.
At the hardware-store counter where he drank coffee with contractors, his description of Lana’s business changed from craft project to niche.
“She found a niche,” he would say.
“Good for her.”
The word niche became a polite way to acknowledge that people were buying something he had predicted they would not want.
Several real-estate agents who once sent every closet client to Sterling began sending some to Lana because buyers had started asking specifically about cedar.
Still, Hank’s business remained larger.
His showroom remained open.
His systems remained familiar and easier to produce at scale.
Lana did not believe she had defeated anything.