Paul Easley sawing figured art wood for the niche market place.

Saw Milling * Tree Farming * Marketing

Paul Easley is a Certified Tree Farmer who has been cutting and marketing wood for over 25 years. As
a Certified Tree Farmer, he and his wife, Kathy, have planted thousands of tree seedlings on their Tree
Farm. Paul says, "I'm a long term planner ... I guess you have to be to plant hardwood seedlings!"
In an effort to market some of the trees thinned to make room for seedlings, he found no large sawmill
interested in his few logs. So, he purchased a portable sawmill and began to teach himself about
sawing wood. The natural progression from there was to market his woods.
Marketing began simply by cutting for the local farmers, making barn wood, fencing, wood for farrowing
crates and more. After stock piling wood the farmers didn't need, he and Kathy opened a retail
woodworking store and sold wood on the retail level. They did this for 15 years. During latter 5 years of
this time, Paul began investigating the possibility of marketing on the Internet. Eventually, they gave it a
try and found it to be a successful place to market unusual figured woods!

FIGURED WOODS
Paul describes figured woods as any piece of wood that has some unusual characteristic that makes it
different from the so called standard for that wood. Those are the woods we look for to feed the niche
market place.

WHAT'S A NICHE MARKET?
Basically, a niche market is any purchaser who buys product not generally available at the local "box
store" or lumber yard. Oftentimes it is called the art market. These are people looking for one of a kind
pieces of wood to facilitate creation of a one of a kind product.