TTJ Awards reflect buoyant timber industry

14 October 2014


This year’s TTJ Awards revealed the timber industry is in positive mood, says TTJ editor Mike Jeffree

In my experience the TTJ Awards are a bellwether for the state of the timber business. If the Awards do well the trade is doing well.

It's not that the event ever did badly in the downturn. But this year it had its biggest audience since 2007 and the biggest number of new sponsors in any given year. The energy and conversations in the room also indicated that this is an industry firmly on the up.

There were pointers to the health of the industry in certain Awards categories as well. There was a particularly strong crop of entries in the over-25 age group Career Development Category. This not only highlighted the enthusiasm of individual employees to continue to develop their skills, knowledge, career paths and ability to contribute to their business, but also the commitment of employers to enhance the capabilities of their workforce, and retain them, for busier times ahead.

The range of entries for the Timber Innovation Award also indicated an industry picking up the pace in terms of developing product capabilities and applications.

Encouragingly, the Awards reflected too that this is a sector with an increasingly clear realisation that unity is strength in the effort to develop the market for timber and wood products in competition with well-resourced and marshalled rival materials sectors.

There was a broad representation of industry associations affiliated to the collaborative Accord group of trade bodies. The Grown in Britain campaign was there, as were leading figures from overseas trade bodies. The Builders Merchants Federation was a first-time sponsor too. It chose to back the Career Development category, reflecting its own major commitment to training and education. But its association with the event clearly also in part underlined its members' commitment to the timber cause.

Another guest was David Lennan, interim chief executive of the Timber Trade Federation, whose job will include project managing exciting proposals to merge with the British Woodworking Federation. Given that between them these bodies have 1,000 members, if it goes through we are looking at a powerful new lobbying force for timber.

The Awards additionally highlighted that the industry is also getting its messaging and marketing right, with a popular winner of the Environmental Achievement Award being the Wood for Good campaign's Lifecycle Database. This open access website provides life cycle assessment data on a wide range of timber products to boost awareness and understanding of the material's carbon credentials. And following its TTJ Awards win, Wood for Good announced the Database is taking the environmental message to a still wider audience, with the launch of new online animations.

TTJ Awards host, architect and TV presenter George Clarke brought the event to a resounding conclusion with the heart-felt message that timber's time has come (p7). It didn't hurt to hear it again, but the feeling was that the industry knows this already, and is girding itself to capitalise.

Mike Jeffree