3-4x
ESTIMATED INCREASE IN OVERALL REVENUE SINCE LAUNCHING ON ZOEY
10x
INVENTORY ABLE TO BE SHOWCASED ONLINE THANKS TO ZOEY
A Unique Product Demands a Better Buying Experience
M. Bohlke Veneer Corp. has supplied architectural veneer and specialty lumber since 1966. Based in Ohio, the company serves architecture, furniture, cabinetry, automotive, and other wood-related markets around the world.
Its lumber operation specializes in imported and exotic wood, including a growing inventory of Live Edge Slabs. Every slab is unique. Buyers may need a specific length, width, color, species, or combination of characteristics for a project. They maintain approximately 5,000 graded slabs ready for sale, with thousands more moving through the grading process.
The Challenge: A Manual Catalog That Could Not Scale
Before Zoey, M. Bohlke displayed only a portion of its Live Edge Slab inventory on a WordPress website maintained by its marketing manager. The online catalog contained several hundred slabs, but adding and managing the complete inventory manually felt nearly impossible.
The website did not display pricing, and buyers had limited ways to narrow inventory to the exact dimensions and characteristics they needed. Sales representatives relied on an internally developed Wood Search Engine that required them to start with a species and review inventory from there.
If a customer needed a slab 20 feet long and three feet wide but was open to different types of wood, a representative could be forced to search through every species individually. They averaged approximately 10 slab sales per month, and the team knew the existing catalog could not support the scale of its inventory or the experience it wanted to provide.
Why Zoey
The M. Bohlke Lumber team evaluated three approaches, including a fully custom website and a mainstream Ecommerce platform. A ground-up build required recreating the underlying functionality, while the conventional Ecommerce option did not align well with the company’s unusual products and B2B requirements.
Zoey stood out because the core functionality needed was already built, but was architected with enough flexibility to be adapted to their business.
“When I discovered Zoey, it was like, “That part is pretty much already done.” You just plug and play with the design. It has been very intuitive, and anything you want to do, I feel like you can do.” Amanda Hale, M. Bohlke Veneer Corp.
The Solution: Searchable Inventory, Controlled Pricing, and Flexible Quotes
With Zoey, M. Bohlke brought its complete graded slab catalog online and created a much faster way to navigate it. Customers and sales representatives can filter inventory by length, width, range, color, species, and other criteria instead of searching through categories one at a time.
Approved business accounts can sign in to view pricing while public visitors cannot. This gives qualified buyers the information they need without exposing pricing across the open website. But prospective customers can browse the catalog and then request access to pricing, with the catalog able to recruit new customers simply by having it available online.
They also configured Zoey’s quote workflow around the way its products are sold. Buyers can request a quote for an individual slab and use custom fields to request additional services, including:
- Slab leveling
- Delivery
- Other product- or order-specific requirements
The company reorganized more than 70 wood species into manageable navigation groups—an experience that would have required substantially more coding on its previous website.
“On WordPress, it would take a lot of coding to do. With Zoey, it was a plug-and-play situation. That really stood out to me.” Amanda Hale, M. Bohlke Veneer Corp.
Implementation: A Launch Built Around Their Timeline
The platform itself could have been launched quickly, but preparing thousands of unique products and the corresponding photography required substantial internal work. M. Bohlke took approximately a year to prepare the full catalog before launch.
Throughout the process, Zoey’s implementation team provided training, recorded sessions, and delivered responsive email support. The recordings became a resource the marketing manager could revisit while learning the platform, while Zoey’s implementation manager solved immediate issues and explained how to handle similar tasks independently.
“Julie was very patient, very informative, and very supportive through email. If she didn’t have an answer, she would find it. Other times, she would explain how she fixed something so I would know how to do it.” Amanda Hale, M. Bohlke Veneer Corp.
Before opening the website broadly, they invited a select group of customers to test it. Feedback was positive from the beginning, and the company then began personally inviting additional customers to register and use the quote experience.
The Results: 3 to 4 Times the Slab Sales Volume
The effect was visible quickly for both employees and buyers. Internally, sales representatives gained a faster way to match buyers with available slabs. Instead of searching species by species, they could enter the required dimensions and narrow thousands of products to the best candidates.
“When this was introduced, it was like I was a magician. They all just loved it.” Amanda Hale, M. Bohlke Veneer Corp.
Approved buyers could see pricing, search by the characteristics that mattered to their projects, and submit structured quote requests online.
Before Zoey: roughly 10 Live Edge Slabs were sold in an average month.
With Zoey: monthly sales volume has tripled or quadrupled, with more than 10 slabs sometimes sold in a single week.
The website has also become a lead-generation channel. They regularly receive account requests from businesses that are not already in their existing customer list, turning website traffic into new sales opportunities.
“We get new people requesting accounts pretty regularly who aren’t in our CRM and who we’ve never heard of before. That’s very cool.” Amanda Hale, M. Bohlke Veneer Corp.
A Flexible Foundation for Continued Growth
M. Bohlke currently uses a focused subset of Zoey’s capabilities, yet the platform has already improved product discovery, quote creation, sales efficiency, and new-account acquisition.
For a business selling thousands of products that are each one of a kind, the most important result is that customers can now find the right piece of wood—and the team can support substantially more sales without returning to an unmanageable manual catalog.
“I really don’t feel like there’s anything I would want that couldn’t be done, which is amazing. Even with how we’re using it, Zoey has been a big help.” Amanda Hale, M. Bohlke Veneer Corp.
