We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kelly & Ali Syed a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Kelly & Ali, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Alright, so we’d love to hear about how you got your first client or customer. What’s the story?
We have utilized social media to the fullest to reach out to our fellow Atlantans, and the woodworking community to let people know we’re here. It is a great free tool, that can help you reach thousands of people. You can spend a small amount of money for ads, which is what we did, to get more exposure and followers. We held our first slab sale in March, and I will never forget the elated feeling of getting an email notification of our first sale! I was driving and saw the notification while at a red light. I had to pull over so that I could open and read the email. The best part for me was that we didn’t know the person! I had to call my husband to tell him right away. At that point, we had received monetary donations from family and friends while we were locating a space, cleaning it up a bit, and building our kiln, but this was our first sale of wood and to someone we didn’t know. It was very exciting! We have had 22 sales so far (we’re still super new!) and only knew 2 of the 22 people. As we have gotten the word out more and more, we’re receiving calls and emails from people wanting to donate their fallen trees, which is amazing. So far have received Pecan, Poplar, Walnut, White Oak, Red Oak, Pine, Hickory, Sweet Gum, and Maple. A Tucker neighbor had to sadly take down an approximately 200 year old Water Oak, and we were able to get that trunk to our warehouse. We don’t have a mill large enough to mill it yet, but we will one day! We were just thrilled to be able to get it and not have it go to a landfill to rot.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?
We are an Atlanta-based Urban Forestry Nonprofit, 501(c)(3) in Public Benefit Charity. People can donate fallen or downed trees to us and get a tax credit for the dollar amount of lumber we can mill from them. We mill them, kiln dry them, and then sell them through our website. When hurricanes like Sally and Zeta that hit metro Atlanta, causing hundreds of trees to fall, and millions of dollars in damages and utility service outages is where the spark started. As tree companies and GA Power rushed to get utilities back in service, most of these trees ended up getting cut up, hauled off to landfills, or were left to rot in the urban landscape.
During this time, the supply of lumber plummeted, and prices soared at most retail locations because of the COVID-19 crisis. Woodworkers, craftsmen, and artisans found themselves with little to no available options to work their trades.
Two metro Atlanta woodworkers, Chris Tappan and Ali Syed, had talked about getting a mill before, and seeing that so much was lost and wasted, decided this was the time. They envisioned an organization that could give purpose to the natural life cycle of these trees and rescue them for the betterment of the environment and the neighborhoods of Atlanta. Hence, Atlanta Wood Foundation, Inc., a metro Atlanta-based non-profit was born.
The tax credit gives an incentive to the donor to want to take that extra step in the process to reach out to us. Tree companies and businesses can also receive a tax credit for donating. There are several lumber yards in Atlanta and the surrounding area, but the tax credit is what sets us apart from them. Urban Wood is a great movement, and we’re thrilled and proud to become a part of it. We just joined the Urban Wood Network, which is a network of over 200 members across the country.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
The great thing about Instagram as a marketing tool is you can target specific areas, hobbies, personal interests, and you can choose your budget. I recently ran an ad for $40, targeting Georgia as the area, and anyone who had interests in woodworking, crafts, building, DIY, or anything to do with wood, I selected it. It ran for 5 days, and we gained 125 followers that are potential customers, two of which purchased slabs within the first week of following us. Another good thing to do is start following other users who would be potential customers of yours. That way they see you and will hopefully return the follow. I would also look up hashtags that fit us, #atlantaga #atlantawoodworker #woodworking, and follow the users who were following those tags. We gained followers from that as well, which some also turned into customers. Instagram is an extremely useful tool that is free, and you can pay within your budget to grow even more, and faster. Use hashtags in your posts so that you will pop up in more feeds. Reels and videos can reach huge numbers, beyond your followers and help you gain more. Post daily if you can, to help stay relevant.
We’d love to hear about how’d you met your business partner.
My husband and I met over 20 years ago while we were living in NYC. My husband, Ali, grew up in Brooklyn and was over the city life, snow, and subway, so we moved to Atlanta in 2004. For me, it was moving back to GA. My family moved to Atlanta in 1980 to escape the snow and cold of Buffalo, NY. I moved to NYC after college for the art world. I was an Art Marketing major in college, so I moved there to work in art galleries. When we came to Atlanta in 2004, I started working for Mason Fine Art, where I still am today. My Dad was a general contractor and craftsman, so for me it feels like home to be in a wood shop. Ali and Chris, our Founders, met at work about 10 years ago. They are both woodworks and have construction experience. Wood is second nature for all of us.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.AtlantaWoodFoundation.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/atlantawoodfoundation/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AtlantaWoodFoundation