Rocky Mountain Forest grows into new ventures

LARAMIE — Ponderosa-pine wood moldings and pellets for wood stoves may not sound like a sturdy foundation for a growing business, but those are the products at the core of the success of Rocky Mountain Forest Products Inc., a $16 million company rooted in the tough high-plains soil of Laramie.

Founded in 1975 by C.L. Burton, the company started out making fence pickets and cut wood stock used to fashion wooden toy blocks and components for companies such as Playskool. In 1995, Burton bought a business in Clifton, Texas, which he still operates from his Centennial, Wyo., ranch. Burton’s partner, Charles Shawvers, purchased the business and is the current president and CEO. Rocky Mountain Forest Products now manufactures 1,240 different varieties of two-inch small-pattern wood moldings.

“Our niche in solid, linear small-pattern moldings gives us an advantage over our competitors who don’t make that kind of molding,” Shawvers said. “We’ve garnered a lot of market share, and we’re holding on to it in the face of some very tough competition.”

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The company has been growing rings around its mostly foreign competition, increasing gross sales at an average annual rate of 20 percent since 1992. Projected 1998 sales of $20 million is almost double its $11.3 million 1995 gross sales. The company’s products are sold throughout Wyoming and Colorado, as well as in parts of Utah and New Mexico.

The rapid growth of Rocky Mountain Forest Products is welcome news in Laramie, a city where new businesses rarely grow so rapidly. The company currently employs 100 and hopes to expand its work force.

“They’ve been a very good corporate citizen, said Bob Boysen, president of the Laramie Economic Development Corp. “I think Rocky Mountain Forest Products has helped lead Laramie to a solid place in the wood-products industry. It has paved the way for other local companies like it.”

Though proud of calling Laramie home, Rocky Mountain has its eye on making its products available nationwide. “We sell to the distributor, who sells to the retail yard,” Shawvers said, “so a lot of our product gets into places like Home Depot, Lowe’s and Builders’ Square through our distribution network.”

Rocky Mountain’s moldings also find their way into catalogs for specialty artisans and restorers of particular architectural styles, such as Victorian, which, Shawvers said, “uses a lot of elaborate moldings.”

The company’s sales growth roughly coincides with the recent boom in the Colorado housing market, although Shawvers points out that Rocky Mountain’s business is growing steadily at a time when new housing construction rates are slowing nationwide.

“Over the last year, we have increased our sales volume by 17.5 percent,” Shawvers estimated. “We are growing our business at the same time the actual U.S. market is shrinking.” What remains of the U.S. market often falls to foreign competition, “coming especially from Brazil and Chile.”

Shawvers said competition has been aided in its attempts to penetrate the U.S. market by the slowdown in our own logging industry, particularly in the Pacific Northwest.

“We used to get 100 percent of our Ponderosa pine from the Pacific Northwest, but that’s been shut down,” Shawvers noted. “The diminished logging industry in the U.S. has allowed competition from abroad to enter the U.S. market, shipping in both raw wood and finished product.”

Rocky Mountain’s products are not exported, but Shawvers believes foreign competition in the U.S. market will result in a reciprocal response.

“Chile, for example, will take over about 30 percent of our market in three years,” Shawvers said. “They’ve taken over a large portion of the market in cut flowers, salmon and fine wine. I can tell you we are down there now.”

Although Rocky Mountain is a resource-intensive company, it pursues its business with as much ecological concern as possible.

“About 90 percent of our wood products are made from pine,” Shawvers said, “and the rest from Appalachian red oak and a kind of mahogany from Brazil. There is a 25-year cutting rotation, so we try to use the resource as efficiently as possible.”

That means no waste. Residual wood that does not become molding is cut into pellets to fuel wood stoves. “We will sell approximately 6,200 tons of wood pellets this year,” Shawvers said. The company is also working on a proprietary product, “in a different market for us, an identifiable product in the commodity market.”

The company’s attention has recently been turned to another kind of waste-related product — cat litter. Rocky Mountain plans to begin making cat litter from leftover wood.

“There are 33 million cats in the U.S.” Shawvers said. “Cat litter is a $6 billion annually business in this country.”

That may be waste, but it’s not chicken feed.