Justin Ephraim: Reduxwood 

Welcome to a brand new episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast. Today your host Steve Larosiliere sits down with Justin Ephraim from Reduxwood! Justin is part of the returning guests club, and a lot has happened since Justin was on the podcast last. Over the nearly two years since Justin and Steve have spoken, an entire pandemic and massive growth for Reduxwood has occurred. So you won’t want to miss this one!

“A lot has happened in the last year and a bit. When we spoke last time, we had just opened our first location with the J. Edward Group in California and San Diego. Since then, we’ve been expanding. First was Vancouver Reduxwood West about three and a half years ago. Then the J. Edward Group opened, and they got their first container just before California locked down. It’s been a wild couple of years.

We were quite aggressive many years ago, acquiring many of the logs we got from the lakes. I flew down there a decade ago, and over eight years, we acquired hundreds of trees from the lakes. So I saw it as a unique opportunity. Something that had some history and a real genuine story. We were one of the first companies in Vietnam to import some of the species into Vietnam; they had not even been registered. Over the past ten years, I’ve had some very big dealers, lumber retailers, and people in the industry come to our facility.”

• Justin Ephraim

Getting a Sense of Scale

Working in Vietnam and Southeast Asia presents some unique opportunities and challenges that people in North America and Europe would not even be aware of. In Justin’s case, he learned a lot just by experiencing the state of the industry in Vietnam, which allowed him to position Reduxwood to take advantage of the many possibilities that the region presented.

“Basically, if I see something unique, offered by anyone in the world, if it’s a tree, I’ll purchase it. Many people don’t know that Vietnam is one of the furniture building capitals of the world; it’s definitely near the top. We were number one for a while when the rest of the world was shut down. When I moved here, I didn’t really understand the scale.

Right now, we’re expanding again. We are opening a location in the UK. I was contacted about a year ago by a client in the UK, and they wanted to open up a location for us in the UK. He was in the biking industry, a distributor and retailer throughout the UK, and he loves what we’re doing. So we’re putting a huge collection together for our first showroom opening in Sheffield, England, and then they’re opening one in Devon, about an hour from London. We’re also going to be located in downtown London. So that’s been a big project.”

• Justin Ephraim

Website: https://reduxwood.com

Instagram: @reduxwood