Top Showrooms: National Lumber
Being the new kid on the block is never easy, especially when you’re a century-old company with a reputation spanning generations of family ownership in your hometown. When National Lumber, a mainstay lumber and building materials (LBM) dealer in the Baltimore market since 1919, decided to expand into the D.C. metro area, opening a new design center in Chevy Chase provided the perfect go-to-market introduction.
The Chevy Chase Design Center opened in May 2020 and, despite debuting in the throes of the pandemic, it has successfully positioned National Lumber to bring its services to the wider region.
-
Inside the Baltimore showroom. -
The showroom strategy is fueling growth in the D.C.-metro area for National Lumber. -
The Chevy Chase Design Center by National Lumber
“A showroom is a great way to open up your arms and say come visit, and the Chevy Chase showroom announced to folks in a polished way that we existed,” says Neal Fruman, vice president of National Lumber and part of the family who founded the business. He and his brother are following in their father’s footsteps, as did their father, grandfather and great-grandfather — across five generations of Fruman’s.
“A showroom is a fantastic way to enter a market in a very inexpensive fashion, where you just have a sales team and displays and you can test out the market,” he says.
At around 1,500 square feet, the Chevy Chase showroom is smaller than the design center at National Lumber’s legacy location in Baltimore, where roughly 3,500 square feet are dedicated to cabinetry, windows, doors and displays of various products. The “proudly independent,” family-owned business employs 70 people, most working out of the Baltimore distribution and design center. The Chevy Chase Design Center is supported by two full-time sales representatives and a kitchen designer.
“We break out the Chevy Chase showroom as a sub business, or a sub P&L within our master business, so we can see how that business does individually and, thus far, it has worked well, so our goal is to keep growing in the D.C. metro area,” Fruman says.
“Because we are located in a very dense urban area – we are really close to the harbor in Baltimore City and really close to some of the gentrified higher-end areas of the city — that ends up lending itself to the types of customer that we’re selling in D.C.”
-
Kitchen vignettes in Baltimore. -
Cabinets are a strong category in Chevy Chase. -
National Lumber’s Baltimore location.
National Lumber deals primarily with professional builders, contractors and remodelers who are doing urban renovation, revitalization and refurbishment, often with an eye to historical preservation.
“Our value-add is our ability to supply refurbished products, historic products … often trying to meet requirements to be historically accurate. Maybe it’s matching a front door or having windows to be in line with history, there are all sorts of nuances you have to be familiar with,” Fruman explains. “Our business is located a couple miles from downtown Baltimore, so we’ve woven our way into the fabric of the building of this city over the last hundred years.”
As demand for housing escalates, National Lumber finds itself “leaning into” the world of multifamily residential, a growing need in both Baltimore and D.C., where existing homes, warehouses, and commercial properties are being converted into condos and apartments.
“Multifamily is a huge trend in our immediate market and that’s a challenge for many LBM dealers because everyone has their own niche in terms of how they can supply product into that world. We manufacture counter tops so we sell a lot of those products into the multifamily world,” he says. National Lumber’s traditionally strong products — kitchen cabinetry and millwork — are also popular for multifamily projects.
“In the multifamily world, you’re selling similar products but the end user is different than our traditional customer, who is a builder or remodeler ordering materials for an addition or to build a house.”
By contrast, the multifamily customer entails a longer sales cycle, with projects that could take a couple of years to finalize, with an entirely different process, and sometimes with demand for a variety of products, like fire extinguishers or mailboxes.
“A typical project would be somebody in D.C. that would take two houses side-by-side, leave the outer four walls, and turn that into six condos. We can do a very good job supplying lumber, cabinetry, windows, the doors — and we understand the delivery and distribution part of that business,” says Fruman, noting they’re also going for the bigger projects where a hundred or more apartments are being updated or created over a year.
While the Chevy Chase showroom is purely a design center, with no inventory on hand, and the Baltimore location has the expanded design center with some inventory, fully 85 percent of their business is for delivery to the customer. That means a key focus of the operation is making sure deliveries run as scheduled, and that National Lumber “maximizes the dollars that are on each truck.”
“We operate 11 vehicles — unlike some larger companies that use a third party for deliveries and distribution — and that’s a value add. When a builder needs [material] tomorrow, a company that controls its delivery fleet can make it happen.”
National Lumber is moving product throughout the Baltimore-D.C. corridor, sometimes into northern Virginia, and the collapse of the Frances Scott Key Bridge earlier this year has presented new challenges for them to work around. As Fruman explains, it was one of the transportation arteries utilized, but not the most travelled route.
“It has caused the other two thoroughfares, I-95 and 895, to experience major traffic, so that has caused headaches, but we are laser-focused on our first time out in the morning and our goal is to have trucks on the road at 6:30 in the morning. We measure our OTIF (on time in full) rate and we take pictures of all our deliveries.”
