Expanding the market for international hardwoods requires three simple questions to be answered: has the industry analysed its customer chain to understand where higher value return might exist for products, what new markets might be out there and who might be new customers?
As an architect, I find it illuminating that the hardwood sector hardly seems to recognise members of this profession as important customers, yet Europe alone has about 570,000 registered, most of whom have specifying responsibility. This is no small or un-influential market. Arguably, too many in the industry focus the bulk of promotional endeavours towards traders and primarily furniture manufacturers, hardly ever towards architects, designers, engineers, building contractors and their end-user clients. Yet so much of the high added value opportunity lies with this latter group. Put simply, the international construction sector has enormous economic significance, construction professional can not only deliver increased sales volumes, but have potential to be the agents for the innovation that, broadly speaking, international hardwood has for so long lacked.
Innovation, however, doesn’t happen in isolation and certainly not without education about the properties and construction potential of hardwood timbers. Europe has some of the best timber education resources in the world and potential to train the world’s architects and engineers in how better to design and specify hardwood timber and explore its use in new, engineered timber products. The relationship is umbilical: investing in construction professionals’ timber education can deliver exponential expansion of the hardwood market.
But new ideas also need to be demonstrated and tested. As Henry Ford said: "before the internal combustion engine, if you asked people what improvements they wanted in transportation, they’d reply a faster horse". So with hardwood – its potential to deliver new products and forms of construction for the 21st century remains largely unimagined.
Softwood shows what’s possible. Twenty-five years ago the range of engineered timber products was fairly small. Today previously non-existent markets, such as tall timber buildings, are fast expanding using cross-laminated timber (CLT), Glulam, laminated veneered lumber (LVL) Parallam and solid wood systems variants. Only now are some of these using hardwood.
Much of the development and demand for these products is led by architects, designers and engineers. The reasons are simple: 80% of the world’s population will live in urban situations by 2050 and this, combined with concerns over climate change and environmental damage from raw materials extraction demands a paradigm shift in the way we conceive buildings and cities. It’s the urban challenge of the 21st century and one that’s tailor-made for greater use of timber products.
Bringing new hardwood products to meet this challenge is possibly the greatest opportunity the industry has ever had, but one that demands new approaches to research, development, manufacture, education and practice quickly.
A coherent strategy, clear timescale and realistic investment are required to deliver these in combination rather than isolation: the reward could well be transformational for hardwood.
