Dumfries Timber Company Ltd

General information

Dumfries Timber Company opened its doors on 19 November 2007 with three Directors and three other members of staff in their new premises at Catherinefield Road, Dumfries. Specialising in timber and all timber related products, and carrying little over £70k in stock, it was a struggle at first. Not everything went to plan. The business had to endure an extremely challenging period for 5 months before telephone and ISDN lines were established. Nonetheless, with only mobile phones in hand the business survived and gradually started to grow.

The vision came from Donald Young who, from his position as a Sales Manager with Finnforest UK Ltd, had studied various independent merchants operating in Scotland. What he found consistently across all the independent timber merchants was their willingness to react quickly and responsively to their customers’ needs together with the management and staff’s hunger for success. This emphasised the need to bring in partners who were like-minded. From his time managing another merchant in Dumfries, Donald knew that Roger Thomson and Colin Cameron would fit the criteria perfectly.

4 years on with18 members of staff and stocks of over £250k, an opportunity arose to take advantage of acquiring two Build Centers, one in Dumfries, the other in Ayrshire. The prospect was simply too good a venture to miss and the directors decided that this represented a wonderful opportunity to not only widen their product base of building materials but also to enter the Ayrshire market where a number of their customers already operated.

5 years to the day from when Dumfries Timber Company Ltd opened for trade, Dumfries Building Supplies opened on Huntingdon Road Dumfries and 1 week later Ayrshire Building and Timber Supplies opened on Portland Avenue in Irvine.

After a frantic first year of trading as the enlarged group, the infrastructure for a multi-site operation was developed, then implemented and the Company opened a new head office in the Huntingdon Road premises, late 2013.

Today, the Company employs over 40 staff and holds stocks of circa £750k, supplying a full range of products to the building trade, garden and landscaping sectors.

We are proud to be members of the National Buying Group, who are a collective of 82 independent merchants covering the entire UK mainland that pool their buying power, enabling us all to compete with the national merchants.

As well, we’re members of the Federation of Small Businesses, the Builder Merchants’ Federation, the Scottish Timber Trade Association and BM TRADA.

Supporting environmental causes relevant to the products we sell is extremely important to us. As such, we have both FSC® and PEFC certification to ensure the timber and timber related products we sell are sourced from both legal and sustainable sources wherever possible.

That leads us to tomorrow… “Watch this exciting space”