Timber Connection: a year of content, and a business that was invisible online

The starting position

Timber Connection import and supply timber. They have been trading for 35 years, they turn over eight figures, and they do it with fifteen people.

Almost all of that was built offline. When we started with them in May 2025 they had a website and very little else: minimal social presence, no regular content, and a customer base who knew them through relationships built over ten, fifteen and twenty years. That works well right up until you need to be found by somebody who has not met you yet.

The story that set the tone for the year

Early on, Danny, who founded the business, sent a lorry load of timber to a customer he had only just started working with. It was not the grade it should have been. He drove up to Scotland himself to look at it, and agreed to take the whole load away. That customer went on to buy four or five containers of timber a month for around fifteen years.

Every timber supplier claims quality, service and reliability, so a year of films repeating those words would have achieved very little. We spent the interview time on how the business actually runs and who runs it. Danny, the chief executive, and Keeley, the managing director, both went on camera, along with several of the team, and the first year was built on stories like that instead of on claims: what they do when something goes wrong, why there is no hierarchy in the office, why the person who answers the phone already knows what you buy. In Danny’s own words, trust takes a lifetime to earn and a second to lose.

How the programme was built

This was the first long-term partnership Lumira had. Before Timber Connection we made films and moved on. Here we agreed six filming sessions across the year, and it is now the shape of most of our ongoing work.

LinkedIn led, because that is where their buyers are. YouTube hosted the films and Instagram carried the shorter cuts. The aim was a consistent presence, so that a new customer could see a good deal of the business before ever speaking to anyone in it.

Later in the year we moved on from who they are to what they know, with a filmed case study made with Archwood Group and its Richard Burbidge brand. Timber Connection have supplied them for more than twenty years, and by matching the timber more closely to the manufacturing process they helped lift yield in key areas from around 60% to around 80%, with less waste and less machine downtime. That case study was published with Timber Development UK and in Supplying Timber, and it became twelve short social edits and a library of stills alongside the main piece.

What it produced

Between May 2025 and May 2026, more than fifty videos and a run of photography across six filming sessions. A LinkedIn account that had been dormant became consistently active, and their analytics for the period record 178,863 impressions, 34,812 clicks and an average engagement rate of 15.7% across the sixty-seven posts tracked, with 906 new followers, every one of them organic.

Over the same period Timber Connection grew sales by 7% and volume by 10% on an eight-figure turnover. A business of that size has several things driving a number like that, and the content programme is one of them rather than the whole explanation.

They have since been nominated in two categories at the Timber Trade Journal Awards: Hardwood Trader of the Year, and the Excellence in Marketing Award. The results are not announced yet.

We now look after their website, SEO, articles and newsletters as well. That was not in the original brief. It made sense as the programme developed to connect the films to everything around them.

Why six sessions rather than one film

A company can be excellent for 35 years and still be close to invisible to anyone who has not already dealt with them. One film could never have shown the depth of this business. Six sessions across a year gave us enough material to keep them visible and to move the subject on as the programme went: from who they are, to how they work, to what they know.

If your business has a long record and very little of it visible online, that is a good position to start from.

Inside the programme: the online ordering platform

Timber Connection had built a platform where account customers could see live stock, filter it, compare grades side by side and order at any hour. It answers a real problem in their trade: an enquiry lands at six in the evening and you want to quote your own customer by the morning.

The platform worked. The difficulty was that a lot of customers either did not know it was there, or assumed it meant the company was stepping back from the relationship. In a business whose reputation rests on answering the phone, that second assumption matters more.

We made a short presenter-led launch film with Selina, filmed inside their warehouse, which holds 16,000 cubic metres of timber and is roughly three times the size of a football pitch. We could have recorded the platform on screen with a voiceover. Filming inside the building does something a screen recording cannot: while Selina explains that you can check live stock at two in the morning, you are looking at the stock. The scale of the place is the evidence for the claim.

The order of what she says took the most thought. The film opens by making clear the platform replaces nothing. Then the practical benefits, in the order a buyer would care about them. It closes on the point that every online order is still picked, packed and sent out by their own team, from that same warehouse.

Inside the programme: the Newmarket race day

Timber Connection host an annual hospitality day at Newmarket for partners and customers. We covered it as part of the programme, which gave them event content and photography for the year and put the relationships that built the business on camera instead of into another sentence about service.

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