Jimmy Rane, the 76-year-old founder and CEO of Great Southern Wood Preserving, a lumber treating outfit, asks with a chuckle, picking up an axe in his Abbeville, Alabama, office and pointing at the letters GATA inscribed down its handle. “It means ‘get after their ass.’ And you’ll see that motto in every Great Southern building.”
The marketing blitz doesn’t stop with NCAA Division I football. Rane also has an alter ego: The “Yella Fella,” a crime-fighting cowboy he portrayed in TV commercials throughout the South from 2004 to 2012. Each ad was structured as an “episode” during the last four “seasons,” complete with a cliffhanger, keeping viewers hooked.
The treated lumber industry is highly fragmented, with many privately owned operators. Even the most seasoned industry observers struggle to quantify the size of the market or any specific firm’s share. But four publicly traded companies are among its largest treaters. The biggest is Grand Rapids, Michigan–based UFP Industries, with $9.6 billion in 2022 revenue; it makes non-wood composites and packaging in addition to treating wood.
In this sort of ultracompetitive commodity business, smart marketing can make a big difference. “In the 1980s and 1990s, nearly all of the pressure-treated wood for residential applications was treated with the same preservative, and all the wood—with a dull greenish tint—looked the same,” sayseditor David Koenig.
Over the years, Rane has spent millions of dollars restoring Abbeville to its 1950s glory. To get a table at Huggin’ Molly’s diner, named for a local ghost, customers pass through a drugstore built in 1926. The pharmacy was shipped to Abbeville from California in 2005, and the counter is topped with an exact replica of Mr. Gower’s soda fountain fromGreat Southern’s marketing team works inside the last restored “castle-style” Sinclair gas station in Alabama.