Online lumber auction house debuts

Home Channel News, Oct 25, 1999

e-Wood.com provides an open forum for product listings and bid submissions

WELLESLEY, MASS. -- E-commerce business e-Wood.com debuted in October with the goal of becoming the industry's premier online lumber and wood products auction house.

E-Wood.com is an e-commerce site, like eBay, that provides a forum to conduct auctions for various lumber and wood-based materials. The site was developed as a "pure" model; the site is open to any company or person who wishes to list a product or submit a bid, according to company president and CEO Arnold Kraft.

Existing lumber-focused e-commerce sites, such as Talpx and Fpix, require users to belong to private networks. Kraft said he wanted to distinguish e-Wood from those kinds of competitors.

"We felt that an exchange or a closed-loop system would be too restrictive," he explained. "This is a purely market-driven model with no constraints. [Users] put their products up however they want."

e-Wood is setting very few guidelines regarding the companies and products that can appear on its auction site. The company currently lists more than $1 million in products from 27 firms representing manufacturers, wholesalers, sawmills, brokers, builders and dealers. Wood products for sale on e-Wood.com are priced between $12,000 and $35,000.

Kraft and Lincoln Alden, e-Wood's vp-business development, founded the e-commerce company. Kraft developed several technology companies -- including Bachman Information Systems, which is now part of Sterling Software -- before joining Alden to create e-Wood. Alden ran a wood furniture manufacturing firm before starting another e-commerce site called WoodExchange.com in 1997.

WoodBxchange.com was a Web site that displayed lumber and wood-related classified ads and eventually was revamped to create e-Wood.

e-Wood's original board members include Kraft, Lincoln Alden as well as his father William Alden. A fourth board member -- former Stanley Works chairman and CEO Donald Davis -- was recently added. The senior Alden, who is personal friends with the former Stanley chief, according to Kraft, recruited Davis.

These four men contributed most of the seed money to get e-Wood up and running, Kraft said. (He declined to disclose how much.) Looking forward, Kraft said he believes the startup site needs two more rounds of fundraising: a venture capital round in the next three to six months, and a possible public offering further down the road.

Kraft said e-Wood's 15-member staff currently is focused in two areas: technology and marketing. With regard to technology, the company is focused on improving the site's features and functions; from a marketing standpoint, the staff is trying to promote the service to the industry's buyers and sellers. When it comes to actual deals, however e-Wood staffers employ a hands-off policy. The buyers and sellers negotiate prices and work out payment and delivery terms.

For the time being, e-Wood is not charging a listing fee, making money only from the commissions it earns on each sale. Starting in 2000, however, Kraft said it would likely charge a nominal listing fee for each product that goes up on the site.

Though e-Wood "officially" opened for business on Oct. 4, the company actually ran demos in August and had a soft opening in September. Since the full-throttled launch, Kraft said the site's traffic has picked up considerably and some "significant" deals have been consummated. He declined to be more specific.