As we started researching this year's WOOD 100, it was immediately clear this is no ordinary year. Woodworking industries, like the economy as a whole, aren't finding a magic bullet to stop the recession in its tracks. Secondary wood production, deeply enmeshed to the economy as a whole, suffers along with every troubled business category.

• Housing? It's hurting cabinets, closets and wood interiors.
• Business malaise? It lopped a third off the casegoods market.
• Consumer spending? As customers pay off credit cards,retailers are curtailing expansion, limiting wood interiors build outs.
• Credit constraints? It's slowing all businesses, including woodworking firms

From the WOOD 100 data, which will be published next month in Wood & Wood Products magazine, we can see forward-thinking firms are retrenching and rebuilding to come out of the recession in top competitive shape. But that has presented some unexpected twists. We've been posting stories about these firms as we find out about them, and you'll find plenty of surprises in next month's WOOD 100. Some examples:

Franchised millwork: What McDonald's is to burgers (or more likely, what California Closets is to home organization), Just Moulding hopes to be for interior woodwork. You've got to give Just Moulding credit for an aggressive and inventive approach to the wood interiors business.>>

House factory: Irontown Housing goes way beyond the normal factory built home, completing fully assembled two-story structures in its Spanish Forks, UT factory. The climate-controlled factory environment with 45-foot ceilings means no pilfering or damage during building; lengthy on-site construction is eliminated. Cabinetry, moulding, paneling and flooring are all pre-installed in the factory and shipped with the entire house.>>

Mobile cabins: The Barn Yard, Lancaster County, PA wooden storage hut builder branched into campground cabins  last fall. Similar to the storage sheds it had been building, these cabins sport wheels and a carriage, so they can be rolled into position at Kampgrounds of America or other sites.

Depreciated assets: Anonymous - this idea is so good it's not for attribution, but a custom woodworking firm has a concept for creating modular commercial interior components. The business proposition: these are depreciable for your clients on a faster basis than conventionally built-in counter wraps and customer service windows. And they are easier to install.

Closing shop: Kok's Woodgoods - What looked like news of common, if unfortunate, closure for a woodworking shop, this one a 40-employee Zeeland, MI wood components manufacturer, revealed instead an aggressively expanding New Zealand conglomerate that has made steady inroads into the U.S. woodworking industry. Tenon LLC, Aukland, New Zealand, acquired this small wood products manufacturer among several properties in a multi-year buying spree.

Tenon, someone you never heard of (so my colleagues suggest), also owns Southwest Moulding, Dallas, acquired by a multi-million dollar minority investment in 2005, and a final buyout in 2009. Given its large moulding and specialty millwork capacity, supplying Texas, Oklahoma and nearby states from a 182,000 square-foot distribution facility in Dallas and a state of the art manufacturing facility in Ponder, TX, Southwest Moulding also partners with Creative Stair Parts for millwork and moulding supply.

Also part of Tenon's mix is Ornamental Products with a 250,000 square foot manufacturing and warehouse space. Ornamental Products offers plain, embossed and carved mouldings and ornaments, CNC or hand carvings, turnings, range hoods and cabinetry accessories. 

What this sampling shows, and we'll have 100 such ideas in next month's WOOD 100, is that the woodworking business is not "your father's Oldsmobile," and is no longer the industry it once was. The industry, and your your role in woodworking, has changed.

Read more of Bill Esler's blogs here>>