Eight Years of Coming Soon

In 2018 I invented a company as a joke. It had a serious name, The Lumber Outlet Group, and a certain expensive calm about it, and a page that said coming soon. That was the whole bit. There was no inventory, no plan, no warehouse. Just a name that sounded like it had been selling wood since before you were born, promising to arrive.

The sign stayed up for eight years. Friends would ask about it the way you ask about someone's novel. Any day now, I'd say, and we would both laugh, and every year I quietly kept the lights on anyway. Here is the thing nobody tells you about a long joke: hold it long enough and it starts holding you. Somewhere around year five, coming soon stopped being the punchline and started being an item on a list.

Brands spend fortunes trying to look like they have been around. Distressed logos, invented founding dates, a heritage stitched on in the same factory as everyone else's. Ours aged in place, by accident, doing nothing, which as any tree will tell you is the only way aging actually works. Est. 2018 is true in the one sense that matters: the idea outlasted every year I ignored it.

So this is the announcement, eight years in the making and shorter than any of the waiting: the store is open. Real things, made of real wood, shipped from Wisconsin in our own boxes with a sticker riding along free, because every order gets one, no exceptions. The sign was not lying. It was just early. Welcome to soon.