We caught up with Luke Brown, head of retail & development at T G Howell & Sons, to find out more about how a small independent merchant is helping keep its customers satisfied.
T G Howell & Sons started in 1956, manufacturing wooden ladders at a small family site in South Wales. It has now grown and expanded its operations so that over 65 years later, there’s nothing they don’t know about timber, with over 70% of its sales coming from treated sawn products. The business now operates two merchant sites and a five-acre wholesale distribution yard with treatment facility. As they have grown over the years, people have remained at the heart of what they do and is something the business is incredibly proud of.
What sets the business apart compared to other merchants locally?
Timber availability is something that we’ve always strived ourselves on. We want our customers to feel confident that we have the material they need – when they need it. For this reason, we typically keep a large volume of our timber on the shelf. This gives us the ability to service orders internally and externally with a much quicker turnaround than many other local merchants. To assist this, we operate our own delivery service with vehicles ranging from 3.5 – 44T. This allows us to cater to a range of customers, from home deliveries to order direct to site.
How has the timber material supply chain been over recent months – is it stabilising? Where have the pressure points been and is the energy crisis changing trade?
Over the last few months, our supply chain has started to stabilise. Materials are now much more accessible, in complete contrast to what we saw over the last 12-18 months. We would even go as far as saying material has been easier to source than it should be, for the time of year. The pressure points have come from the range of timber that’s been available since mid-2020 and uncertainty over Russian timber supply following the start of the war in Ukraine. More recently, our current energy crisis has caused a change to our customers shopping behaviour, as many people remain uncertain about the cost of their bills over the winter period.
What are the market leading timber products for the trade and construction sector that you are seeing?
Our core focus as a business is fencing and landscaping product. With this in mind, feather edge and standard sawn timber remain the leading products from our range. We always make sure our timber is supplied from FSC or PEFC-certified suppliers. In fact, this is one of our criteria for suppliers, as we would never consider offering uncertified or conflict timber.
How does T G Howell & Sons see the merchant sector developing over the next 18 months – how can the sector improve and thrive more?
The next 18 months look set to be a challenge for the merchant sector. Coming off the back of two very strange years, things seem to have slowed down to pre-Covid demand. Our business and certainly the industry learnt a lot over the last couple of years. As an independent, we’re aware that we relied too heavily on sales just through our merchant sites, failing to invest as much as we should have in our digital systems and online. The huge upturn in customers shopping from home throughout the pandemic gave us an opportunity to really drive this area of our business. As we begin to return to the new ‘norm’, a lot of these shopping behaviours seem to have remained and customers are shopping around a lot more before committing to purchase materials. We only see this trend increasing over the next 18 months, as the future remains uncertain on the increase in cost of living. That’s why we’re continuing to invest in this area of our business to better serve our customers and to remain reactive to changes in our market.
You can read the full feature in the Autumn Timber Trader UK magazine
