Bear Creek Lumber delivers anywhere

Home Channel News, March 20, 2000 by Brae Canlen

Remote yard in Washington state sells exotic woods globally

Not many customers drive through the gates of Bear Creek Lumber, located in a remote section of north central Washington State. But the family owned operation gets plenty of hits on its Web site, where it serves home builders and remodelers through our North America, the Pacific Rim and Europe.

Bear Creek Lumber specializes in hard-to-find species of wood, an inventory it maintains on 25 acres outside the town of Winthrop, Wash., population 300. Ela and Cloud Bannick have operated the lumberyard for 23 years, but in 1996, as online selling was starring to pick up steam, the couple decided to inch on to the Internet.

"My daughter Omaste came home from college and offered to put up a Web site," Ela Bannick explained. "We wanted to make it easy for customers to find us, so it seemed like a good idea." The company's Internet traffic was meager at first, but within a year, bearcreeklumber.com was getting queries from Japan and Hong Kong.

Over the proceeding four years, Beat Creek Lumber shipped its products -- mostly western red cedar, Alaskan yellow cedar, Appalachian hardwoods, Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine -- to building sites in Guam, Hawaii, Jamaica, England and Germany. Customers can check product availability online and e-mail their job specs to obtain quotes. Bear Creek's sales reps make the final arrangements by fax and phone.

The typical Bear Creek customer is a craftsman, carpenter, architect or custom-home contractor looking for something different. Exterior siding is one of the company's big sellers. Other uses for its specialty woods include flooring, cabinets, decks, airplane struts and boat exteriors.

Bear Creek uses a variety of shipping methods and distributors to back up its "we deliver anywhere" promise. Transporting lumber to an island off the coast of Maine took some planning, Bannick said, but the company seemed more daunted by the task of shipping a load of western red cedar to the American Museum of Natural History in downtown Manhattan.

Wilderness operation

While the Bannicks consider the details of their shipping operation proprietary, Ela Bannick shared some of the other trade secrets she's learned conducting e-commerce in the wilderness.

"Nothing we do here is industry standard," said Bannick, who handles the company's marketing, personnel, contracts and finances.

For starters, Bear Creek's customers usually pay for their lumber upfront, before it's delivered. Returns are rare. "We make sure were sending them what they want," Bannick explained. "But if a customer wants to return a product, we look for another buyer in the area." Sometimes, that means arranging for temporary storage, she added.

Bear Creek employees use Macintosh G3 and G4 computers side-by-side with PCs in a dual screen setup that runs both systems simultaneously. Bannick has stuck with Apple computers because training is easier for employees, most of whom are hired from the local community.

"If you're going to commit to e-commerce, you need to have strong leadership from the top," Bannick said. "It can't be, 'Well, we'll try this out, and if it doesn't work, we'll go back to the way we were before.'" Bannick ran into considerable resistance when Bear Creek got serious about computerizing its operation; many employees grew wary of the need to learn new commands whenever Bear Creek upgraded its equipment. "They felt they had worked hard enough to learn the programs they already knew," Bannick explained. The company experienced a high turnover at first, but in retrospect, Bannick thinks it was a blessing. "People who are uncomfortable with the technology will undermine the direction your company is going in," she observed.

Bear Creek's geographic isolation has presented its own set of limitations. Internet providers are not flocking to Winthrop, leaving Bannick at the mercy of "one guy who has a monopoly," she said. Attracting "techie" talent, a necessity for a business so reliant on computer savvy, is tough; few professional employees want to live in a rural area. On this front, the Bannicks have been lucky; their daughter Omaste became the company's webmaster, and her boyfriend was hired as the network administrator.

All in the family

Bear Creek's image as a family operation comes through on its Web site, a hodgepodge of monthly specials, professional advice, folksy tidbits about the company and information on shipping and ordering. Browsers can read an online issue of Timberline, the lumberyard's monthly newsletter, which often features pictures sent in by Bear Creek customers: a cedarclad house in Breezy Point, N.Y; an apartment building (also done in cedar) in Friars Hill, W.Va.; a Douglas fir kitchen (wall panels, cabinets and flooring) in Pahrump, Nev.

Stanley Acton, owner of Acton Construction in San Jose, Calif., described himself as a "very minor" customer of Bear Creek Lumber. But he pays $20 a year for a subscription to Timberline, which he reads "religiously."

"I like [Timberline's] Industry News column," he said. "It gives me the more non-environmental, Republican side of the business." Acton can get most of what Beat Creek offers from local lumberyards without much problem. But Acton at times has quoted Bear Creek's prices on big projects, and "they were dead on" with local prices, he said.