Duchy Timber Develop a New Home Grown Garden Furniture Range for 2013 (Part One)

Duchy Timber is an established timber manufacturing and merchanting business and we have an equally established range of products for our various markets and customers.

We have been producing quality garden furniture made from timber felled in the south west of the UK for years. It’s a concentrated range that includes picnic tables, benches, seats and a large dining table. We felt that we could expand the range by complimenting the existing items and designing new ones and, as a result, increase the demand for locally grown timber and the value added in the south west region.

It was with much interest that we noted the contents of a recent timber industry report commissioned by the Forestry Commission entitled “Opportunities to Add Value to South West Home Grown Timber – Analysing the BusinessCase”. In it, the consultants identified that:

“The best opportunities for processing more of the potentially available roundwood in the SW is to encourage and support the existing sawmills to increase production by expanding their existing markets and improving or developing new product lines.” (Forestry Commission England & South West Woodland Renaissance Partnership, 2011).[i]

This conclusion is in harmony with Duchy Timber’s strategy of adding value to home grown timber and with this call to action ringing in our ears, we got to work in 2012 concentrating on developing our value-added products, specifically our garden furniture range.

Duchy Timber Companion Seat.

In October 2012 we brought in joiner and 3D Design graduate Ian Reveley to the carpentry shop and briefed him to create a range of new pieces based on existing construction methods and the materials already available in the yard. Over the next couple of months Ian set to and created almost 30 pieces for consideration, testing and development. 

As Ian built up this large range of pieces, management and marketing were on hand to give their opinions and to make suggestions for further developments. We also sought the advice of one of our distributors; Sustainable Furniture. Some of the early pieces went through several generations of production until all involved were happy to release them onto a wider audience. Through the several generations it was clear that we were going to end up with three distinct lines within our product range. Some of the new pieces augmented our current range, the majority of them were entirely new, but fell into two very distinctive styles.

At the end of November 2012 we devised a score sheet for colleagues across the company and asked as many of them as possible to mark each item on five simple scoring points.

Guys from the yard marking the furniture prototypes.

Once we had received a good number of responses from across the company, we decided not to pursue the least popular products and by doing so ended up with a solid 13 items. These remaining pieces will go on into the next stage of our process: materials & labour cost analysis.

Stay tuned to Duchy Timber’s Blog to find out what happens next! Alternatively, go to our website to find out more about the company and its current products.

[i] Forestry Commission England & South West Woodland Renaissance Partnership (2011) Opportunities to Add Value to South West Home Grown Timber – Analysing the Business Case. Bristol: Forestry Commission.