64 | Feature: English Woodlands
Above left: The retail area of the warehouse Above right: Ian McNally (left) and Tom Compton
◄ Mr Kelly has spent considerable amounts on hardwood from English Woodlands for his house project in Richmond and the video clip has seen thousands of views. English Woodlands MD Tom Compton is also a media star, with his immense hardwood knowledge making for some popular videos on individual species. This also provides an educational resource where the next generation of timber users can gain knowledge – such as furniture students at nearby West Dean College of Arts & Conservation using it to swot up on oak and how to use it.
The company has a five-pronged approach to social media – LinkedIn, FaceBook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram. Of these Twitter and Instagram have the biggest reach, with 4,329 followers on Twitter, 5,361 on Instagram and 983 on FaceBook, while YouTube has had 26,000 views from March 2020 to February 2021. Instagram has yielded the biggest level of engagement, while FaceBook has seen a great growth in activity over the past year.
Elsewhere, in the area of digital technology, there is use of tablets, video conferencing and WhatsApp by staff to interact with customers. “We use every single communications tool to liaise with our customers and show them timber,” Mr McNally added. English Woodlands’ digital wizard Sarah Farmer said the company had embraced technology over the past year in a way that might otherwise have taken years. “And because of the change in dynamic with the customers, we now spend more time in development mode, lean thinking and training,” she said. “We have made space for daily change and development. It’s become natural to us.”
STOCKS English Woodlands has trimmed its stock levels down to be more efficient, balancing
TTJ | May/June 2021 |
www.ttjonline.com Above: The web shop is attracting lots of business for English Woodlands Timber
its Super Prime and Prime Oak S/E across the range, redefining pricing to improve competitiveness for oak W/E and S/E, with oak, ash, elm and chestnut being the core ranges.
“The trigger for buying new stock is not to buffer our stock but to service new orders,” said Mr McNally. “We have eaten up a lot of the buffer we had within the system. Basically, we only order when we need to, whereas before we ordered speculatively.” This didn’t create too many problems when some items go out of stock – customers were understanding and flexible when it occurred. French mills supplying oak have remained open during the pandemic – in fact, Covid has proved easier than Brexit in terms of ease of supplies. Logistics and cost of transport from the supplier mills has caused some issues due to availability of lorry drivers and other factors.
In terms of managing customer visits on site, English Woodlands is looking at visits to be more controlled in the future, which will help productivity. In the past, the company gave extraordinary latitude to view boards out of packs and compare products in other packs. The combination of Covid-19 guidance and increased product information and photos on the website have led to better efficiency.
“Our business has achieved a 30% growth rate, which for a small business like this is significant and we foresee achieving a turnover approaching £5m in the next 18 months. In January, February and March we were running at that sort of level. The volume of orders coming into the business is something we haven’t seen before. We have transformed it. “We’ve used the Covid crisis as a catapult on the digital side,” concluded Mr McNally. ■
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