I think it would be fair to say that we have witnessed a “revolution” in the home improvement industry over the last 15 years.
In fact growth has been so large that the home improvement market is now much the same size as the new house building market.
Not only have we seen changes in retail formats, but consolidation in retail formats, too.
This “revolution” has had a profound effect on the way we do business.
Another interesting change can be seen in lifestyle trends. With the growing aging population, higher proportion of single home owners and the “sea breeze” set illustrating just a few of these, the difficulty today of predicting consumer behaviour can perhaps be better appreciated.
In order to overcome this, the traditional segmenting of markets in terms of life-cycle or demographics is now being superseded by a “shopping experience” model.
This format identifies two main types of shopper, the “inspiration shopper” who is looking for ideas and the “destination shopper”, who not only knows what they want, but wants to purchase it quickly.
Naturally this is impacting on the development of our merchandising and point of sale material.
The world is also most definitely going “green”.
In view of the impact that this is going to have on issues such as sourcing and species availability, we find the perceived disunity of the timber industry a matter of concern.
While our building industry competitors such as steel, plastics and concrete, have been able to portray a unified approach, the same can certainly not be said about our industry.
This disunity is a great shame, as timber certainly has an important story to tell our communities.
For instance, what other building product is a renewable resource, bio-degradable and requires minimal energy to process and also looks and feels beautiful?
Perhaps one of the strongest mitigating factors working against timber is that, unlike our competitors who tend to be dominated by key players, the timber industry is comprised of many vested groups (just think of timber importers, native forest groups, plantation forestry to name just a few) each with their own agendas.
Despite timber’s good story, if we are not careful, we could leave our industry exposed to our competitors.
The “wood is good” message is not connecting with the community.
Having been in the timber industry for over 40 years and having seen first hand how the many challenges to which it has been exposed have been weathered and overcome, I see no reason why the industry cannot continue to do so in the future.
We must unite. Not only has our industry the products and the talented people, but there is definitely strength in “many” when the “many” all pull in the same direction - this is our current challenge.