$240,000 · 14 months · ~8,000 skus

Woodland Supply & Manufacturing is a long-standing company built across three divisions: Woodland Manufacturing, supplying custom architectural millwork, hardware, and stair components B2B across North America; Woodland Supply, a Winnipeg retail operation; and Boreal Woodwork, a high-end installation arm. This piece covers the Manufacturing division, which specializes in high-end, custom interior finishing, a technical, building code adjacent category where getting the specs exactly right isn’t optional.

The real first campaign and the missing proof

Woodland’s real advantage was never just the product, it was the expertise behind it: knowing what pairs with what, how a complex finishing project actually comes together, how to spec it so installation goes smoothly. But expertise nobody can see isn’t something a customer can trust. When I joined, that proof didn’t exist: the entire web presence was one landing page and two PDF brochures, and roughly half the information in them was wrong, including the drawings. There was no quality digital imagery of any kind, not a single usable photo or rendering; I was starting from zero. Before I could market what Woodland knew, I had to make it visible and credible.

Rebuilding sixty years of product data

I reconstructed nearly the entirety of the company’s product data, sourcing and reconciling 60 years of records to document hundreds of products and thousands of SKUs, while building an entirely new product line from the ground up. The records were scattered across the ERP, decades-old paper, and the shop floor tooling itself, and much of it was wrong, outdated, or worn from years of use. I pulled drawings from the CNC machines where they existed, and measured and traced the product by hand where they didn’t. Counted in drawings, the product offering doubled.

Solving the imagery problem for under $20,000

Photographing hundreds of products across sixteen wood species wasn’t realistic. I proposed 3D renderings instead, well beyond what leadership had originally planned. A professional studio quoted $160,000. I hired two independent modellers and renderers and delivered it for under $20,000, an 88% saving. I drew product outlines, the modellers extruded and textured them, and I led the sales team through a visual review of every model in every species before anything went live.

Building and launching the platform

I helped secure $200,000 in government funding through the Canada Digital Adoption Program, scoped requirements, managed the vendor relationship, and coordinated launch across sales, production, and leadership. The sales team and I then spent eight months validating every product against the reconstructed data before go-live, catching errors that would otherwise have shipped.

The result: 511 distinct profiles live across 16 wood species, filterable by category, thickness, width, and profile, with quoting and ordering built in.

What it changed

Woodland’s dealer network grew; listings increased by 35% with locator traffic going from nonexistent to multiple hits a day within months. Dealers across Canada and the United States could finally sell us properly: partners had been asking for specs and imagery for years so they could carry Woodland product in their own systems. Internally, the operations portal became the plant’s training system, standardizing specs and procedure for new hires and twenty-year veterans alike.

What this proved

This is the kind of project other seasoned Woodland employees attempted for years and quietly shelved. The scale was what made it so hard, not just the complexity: sixty years of records, thousands of SKUs, spread across systems and formats that had never been reconciled against each other. It required range to move between strategy, data, and shop floor operations in the same week.

Built to compound

The platform gave Woodland something to finally sell online, but the real payoff was never a single campaign. Infrastructure like this compounds: it’s still generating revenue, efficiency, and trust for the business well beyond anything I did with it in the moment. What we built with it next is its own story: a door line, designed and launched from scratch, that turned that foundation into real revenue.