There are not many similarities between outdoor furniture and aerospace, except for Robert Pruitt, founder of Georgia-based poly lumber outdoor furniture provider SoPoly.
In addition to being an airline pilot for Delta, Pruitt started an aerospace supply chain company around 2005 and made his way into the outdoor industry when his family was looking for premium poly lumber furniture for their beach house.
“Lead times were unusually long, and this was 2019, before the pandemic put a serious strain on the supply chain,” he says. “So I just kept asking questions like, where and how is this made? The more I dug into it, the more I saw that all the manufacturing of these products appeared to be in the north, yet a high percentage of the sales for it came from the south. And I just didn’t find anybody in the south that was doing it.”
He made a trip up to New York and found an extrusion line that was for sale, bought it and brought it down to Georgia and within a year had things up and running. As they started extruding their own lumber and building products from that, Pruitt says they’ve amassed a large amount of SKUs, which is one way the company sets itself apart.
The poly lumber business is a crowded market, with several strong players that make the majority of the sales. However, Pruitt says that not many of them make their own lumber.
“Coming out of the gate, I realized quickly that if you had to purchase someone else’s lumber, you’re going to pay their markup, and so you’re automatically down one notch,” he says. “Having your own lumber and essentially being able to transfer it from your right hand to your left hand for making furniture with possibly no markup in it is a huge benefit.”
The company is also offering two tones and mixing and matching colors within the products. Pruitt says that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but when you think about the number of SKUs this provides, it creates an advantage for SoPoly.
“We’ve been able to control our costs and not have to charge for two tones, which you see a lot of time with our competitors,” he says. “That’s been really beneficial. In the south, where we’re really focusing, is we try to deliver an option of either boxed or fully assembled, and so I’ve looked at logistics that I’ve learned from my previous company and applied it to this one, too.”
That means they do a lot of their own deliveries with their own trucks. Pair that with the fact that the only part of the products they don’t make are the screws, and it makes sense how they can offer special perks like two tones and quick delivery.
As Pruitt looks to the future, he says he will employ a military flying tactic called the OODA Loop.
OODA is an acronym for observe, orient, decide and act coined by famous pilot John Boyd in the Vietnam War who was very successful in shooting down other aircraft. He learned that if he observed what was going on, orientated himself to that, made a decision of what he was going to do and then acted on it — and if he did that faster than his opponent — then he put them on the defense all the time.
“For us, it’s been a lot of orientation and observing what’s going on so far,” Pruitt says. “Sometimes you think it’s going to be one thing, but until you execute it, it really starts showing itself with things that you missed and different variables. So we’ve taken the time to get our processes down and now we’re in a position to start scaling.”
The company has a 100,000-square-foot building where all of the in-house processes from product creation to delivery execution take place and has started expanding nationally this year.
“Right now we’re on the hunt for more dealers and looking to keep growing,” Pruitt says.
