In Traverse City, Michigan, a local building materials and solutions showroom is leveraging its national footprint to offer customers a diverse portfolio of products and services. Spanning approximately 17,000 square-feet and set next to its own lumber yard, Builders FirstSource’s local Traverse City showroom offers a diverse selection of pre-built designs that showcase only a sliver of the company’s capabilities.
Every redesign or new project needs good bones, and Builders FirstSource intends to deliver them. Founded in 1998, Builder’s took advantage of the late 1990s housing boom that saw more than 1.6 million private homes built. The company expanded steadily until 2008 during the peak downsizing of lumber yards in the US. Then, at a time when the amount of lumber yards shrunk from 700 to nearly 150 in Michigan, Builders acquired dozens of them in the state and across the nation, including the one near its Traverse City location.
Strolling around the showroom, a customer can see the full range of possibilities. There is a kitchen built from Builders timber—bright wooden cabinets, black high-top seats, and a granite-top island that houses bookshelves on the side; there is a checkerboard floor with a large selection of hardwood flooring options housed in a garage-style structure; and there is a porch with dark, wood decking, matching chairs, and tastefully contrasted near-matte white handrails.
As it has grown, the company has focused on giving designers as many options as possible, without losing sight of what makes all their locations across forty states unique. With local designers, and local builder teams, each location a twist of its own. Builders also sports their own transportation fleet to ensure they are solely responsible for getting their clients’ building supplies delivered safely and soundly.
Though Builders FirstSource offers about four hundred locations, wholesale cost building supplies, and an in-house transportation fleet, it is arguably its focus on local expertise and customer relationships—paired with a national reach—that has helped it grow from a small enterprise into a Fortune 500 company. The company not only has become one of the nation’s largest suppliers of structural building products and components, but also provides services for new residential construction and remodeling, offering solutions in roofing, flooring, wall panels, windows, custom millwork, and design.
Text: Tyler Fleser
Photography: Builders FirstSource
