At Design and Construction Week 2024 Eric G sits down with Millboard Decking. If you have never heard of them they are a company that makes a new innovative deck board that looks like real wood, instead of the usual composite decking this looks just like the real thing. Plus they have parts that can be bent into a radius without heating. We we sit down with Greg Cowan, Millboard CRO, and Martin Stevenson, Millboard Marketing Director for North America and talk about the new stuff they came out with for 2024 and what you can do to make your next siding or decking project look amazing this year. For more information check them out at www.millboard.com and in the US check out their distribution at https://outlive.info/

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Mentioned in this episode:

Baldwin Hardware

Baldwin Hardware

A new kind of decking and siding from Millboard

For more information about the latest in decking and cladding head to https://www.millboard.com/

A new kind of decking and siding from Millboard

For more information about the latest in decking and cladding head to https://www.millboard.com/

[00:00:05] Martin Stevenson: I was sitting in my chair gently popping up and down thinking, No, you can just go and install it and bend the stuff, because it's flexible enough to install at normal temperatures. Back at Valentine's Day, Kevin Jacquet over at the Builders in Rhode Island did a beautiful thing.

[00:00:43] Eric Goranson: radius.

[00:01:04] Eric Goranson: Las Vegas, 2024, and we're at my favorite decking, siding, everything company in the world here with Millboard. Thanks for coming in guys.

[00:01:17] Eric Goranson: Oh, that is so great. Let's do some introductions.

[00:01:26] Greg Cowan: It's nice to be able to sit down. We have been busy for a couple of days.

[00:01:35] Martin Stevenson: Harry, hi, I'm Martin in town. Despite the accent, I'm actually from Boston.

[00:01:51] Eric Goranson: yeah. Guys, you guys do so much stuff. And I first ran into you guys on social media. And I was like Okay, [00:02:00] I got to figure this stuff out because this is different than anything else on the market today.

[00:02:14] Greg Cowan: curved bench. Yeah. With a coffee. How cool is that?

[00:02:23] Eric Goranson: I want to talk just about, because you guys do something different than basically. Yeah, so we're

[00:02:42] Greg Cowan: What I love about the product is, every board is so unique. They're all hand brushed for the first color, so there are no two boards that are the same. You would have seen the boards outside that are from 100 year old French train carriages? Yeah. Have you seen the nails in them?

[00:03:04] Eric Goranson: I'll tell you a funny

[00:03:21] Greg Cowan: You know, you're working for a good company. When that happens,

[00:03:36] Eric Goranson: And this is like what 4. 6 million square feet, but they look like a printed product. No offense to you guys out there, but it looks like something. Something that you'd see at every other home center out there in this stuff. When you see it, you think visually and texturally, that it's real wood. Yeah. It's made using

[00:03:54] Martin Stevenson: Yeah. So we are, we are molding it from real oak planks. Yeah. Rather than running it through an [00:04:00] extruder or embossing a surface onto a board. So you, you just get a depth of detail in the grain, which is absolutely beautiful. And, uh, the way the boards reflect the light is so natural and you, you, you just get.

[00:04:18] Greg Cowan: factor. Yeah.

[00:04:20] Martin Stevenson: really is something I, I'm picking up on. You're talking about how nice and innovative the product is. What I'm loving seeing and I, I'm experiencing myself here, is the way that artisans are picking up on this product and absolutely innovating with it and bringing their creativity to the product.

[00:04:57] Martin Stevenson: You're not just making a board, you're [00:05:00] making a way for people to live. It's a

[00:05:06] Eric Goranson: Yeah, but what's cool about it is Is it? It's not something that you have to worry about what mother nature is going to do to it, right? If you are making something out, let's say you're doing an outdoor kitchen and you're putting it out there around this area, you don't have to worry if somebody spills a little bit of grease from the barbecue on it.

[00:05:28] Martin Stevenson: boards are are waterproof. Yeah, exactly. You can wipe stuff off of them. But another thing that's coming out really to the fore here, we we're talking for people from all over the country, is that the inside of the board, the interior is mostly, it's a limestone product, actually powdered limestone.

[00:06:08] Martin Stevenson: Yeah it just makes for a crisp finish and you can really see the the perfect craftsmanship that people are able to execute.

[00:06:24] Eric Goranson: Yep. That's all right. Yeah. So I, oh man, this is going to be hot. Not really. Not really. It's cooler than another composite deck board would be. So that's what's cool about that. Yeah. It works really well. So. There's a lot of stuff to talk about here. You guys are not like one trick pony here. There's a lot of different stuff.

[00:06:59] Eric Goranson: Yeah, [00:07:00] that's right There two different applications and they're two different looks, but they're both

[00:07:15] Martin Stevenson: Mm-Hmm, . So you can have, it's, it's almost like a, a high-end hardwood look on, on a deck. But then on the other side, if you want a, a more rustic finish. We've got a board which it almost looks like a railroad tie the way the old wooden sleepers that yeah Have that lovely depth of character to them and something Something we've seen people doing with it is building docks, uh, because these surface of the board is naturally slip resistant.

[00:08:03] Martin Stevenson: And, um, it just makes for a great way to, for people to experience the great outdoors in areas that you just Wouldn't be able to put wood in any way that would last for any length of time.

[00:08:18] Eric Goranson: And that is just absolutely gorgeous, but it's not, not slippery at all. Now, other deck boards you get a little water in. I'm in the Pacific Northwest, so we get a little layer. Slime on everything, right? That moss and mold, that's not a slippery

[00:08:35] Martin Stevenson: slime grows because there's some protein in those boards that the slime can feed on to grow.

[00:08:59] Martin Stevenson: [00:09:00] So there's no, no sanding off, no staining. It's just a great low maintenance product with a good look. Absolutely.

[00:09:16] Greg Cowan: Yeah, I was going to say, I heard this. Normally on a Thursday and a Friday when you're at work. If you do get it on the weekend, the one thing you do is cleaning your deck. You want to be able to go out enjoying it. So, there is the advantage. And as an Aussie, I'd love to be able to take a little bit of the Mickey out of the Brits.

[00:09:31] Martin Stevenson: this.

[00:09:34] Eric Goranson: I, there we go. Hearing both sides of that fence, then without sp sprinters.

[00:09:49] Martin Stevenson: So for about six months of the year, I work outdoors in the screen porch and I've got my desk there and I bring my laptop out. That's where I, and I was on a, one of those video calls with one [00:10:00] of my colleagues. Mm-Hmm. and. She was telling me that in the background of my Airquotes office, what she could hear was the birds singing.

[00:10:34] Martin Stevenson: I think

[00:10:37] Martin Stevenson: probably work with that. Yeah, yeah.

[00:10:39] Eric Goranson: Yeah, absolutely. See,

[00:10:42] Eric Goranson: every morning when I look in the mirror. Yeah, absolutely. That's what's cool. And, and as for somebody that's built with it now. So I've worked with kind of three or main products.

[00:11:12] Eric Goranson: It's interesting. So

[00:11:29] Greg Cowan: Don't actually believe the product until they do it themselves. Yeah, it's, it's fantastic. It's lovely to work for a company where people look at you and go,

[00:11:48] Eric Goranson: And yeah, we got more comments about what

[00:12:08] Martin Stevenson: And then I tell them it was screwed straight through the face of the board. fastener underneath. We just put screws through the surface of the board. elastomer surface. It's a bit like the sole of your sneaker that just closes up the screws. And that's a fantastic

[00:12:26] Greg Cowan: We've got a new guy we started today. He's doing the screw demo. Nice. It's not hard. My eight year old son can do it. Night now. Birthday last week. Yep. Sorry Samuel.

[00:12:42] Eric Goranson: And that's one of the tips that I always give people working with it is if you're trying to get something fit, sink those screws down most of the way. Get it where you want it. Then drive it all the way down. Because you're gonna have a hard time finding that screw later. Yes.

[00:12:55] Eric Goranson: is a neat finish. It is.

[00:13:14] Greg Cowan: happens once you forget to cover the plug, then you get water, then you get, it's not, it's porous, then you have issues and then you have extra cost and then it becomes

[00:13:22] Eric Goranson: Yep. And it's. And it's not like there's a benefit to it. It's not like you can go back and pop that plug out easily and tighten something that there's no reason to get back at it. So that's the beautiful part of being able to just drive that screw home and forget it.

[00:13:53] Martin Stevenson: Leftover from the food industry. Really? Yeah. So when, when your product, when your food says [00:14:00] enriched with calcium, there's a bit left over and we turn it into the boards, the insides. That is cool. So there's a recycled, reused product there, but also millboard is made without using a lot of energy. And some, many of the other boards, the more plasticky boards require a huge amount of energy to melt plastic a couple of times to make the board.

[00:14:40] Martin Stevenson: So it's a, it's a nice story.

[00:14:56] Greg Cowan: So it's even better from that point of view as well. That's

[00:15:13] Eric Goranson: Cause there's some beautiful stuff here. Okay.

[00:15:30] Martin Stevenson: It's a lovely, lovely, rich red color. And if you marry that with some of the thinner deck. boards, which are in a white color. You get this beautiful kind of barn look like you might be familiar with seeing in, in the hinterland of the United States, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania. And it's, it's a great old rustic look to it.

[00:16:08] Martin Stevenson: Which is called Decor, and it's an aluminum strip that can insert into the tongue of the groove between boards. Comes in a few different colors. We got a black one I'm sitting looking at here with a light colored board. And somebody was in the room just recently and said, it looks like a modern take on a log cabin.

[00:16:32] Eric Goranson: about having a black and tan right now after this. I'm getting

[00:16:42] Eric Goranson: had to fit a pint in here someplace. Yeah. Some of the

[00:16:47] Greg Cowan: It is gorgeous. Yep. I'll let

[00:17:08] Martin Stevenson: Or deep Sydney.

[00:17:28] Eric Goranson: talk about this. Decor strips, so does it just slide into a groove in the side?

[00:17:34] Martin Stevenson: extrusion and it, it has itself a tongue and groove. So it matches the tongue and groove of the board. And we've made it in three colors and two widths and a couple of shapes. So when you take that and then you take all the different colors of the boards, you can riff on the permutations.

[00:17:57] Eric Goranson: you can, this. [00:18:00] My design background. I see this and I'm just going crazy going, this is so cool. Oh my gosh. Now that brushed gold is that is gorgeous. Oh yeah. That is cool. Do that with the block.

[00:18:16] Martin Stevenson: So if you're building maybe a privacy screen or an outdoor shower, this would be a lovely way to enhance it. Both of

[00:18:36] Eric Goranson: And that is something there that again, innovative where you guys grab it and say, Oh, we're gonna do something different.

[00:18:54] Greg Cowan: It's easy to follow details on the website, the YouTube videos, et cetera. So it's not complicated. You got it. [00:19:00] So you can try

[00:19:09] Eric Goranson: Now you guys get to go through and say hey We're gonna embrace what we do. Well, you put this beautiful piece in there and hold the deck boards down correctly We've got something for

[00:19:29] Eric Goranson: product.

[00:19:47] Eric Goranson: It's that realistic when somebody can walk out there, touch it and feel it and go, what

[00:20:06] Martin Stevenson: I

[00:20:13] Martin Stevenson: What a nice thing to have in your house. Something that you like so much you want to go stroking.

[00:20:27] Greg Cowan: again.

[00:20:29] Eric Goranson: that I won't. Give

[00:20:35] Eric Goranson: Yeah, and that's what's great. So, I tell you what. So there's so many things you can do with these products. I mean, you guys keep taking stuff and you took what was a decking product and now you could literally do three tones on the outside of a house and give completely different looks with the similar product.

[00:20:54] Greg Cowan: I say it's a building material product. Yeah. Not a decking product. Yeah. Our heritage is decking, but I said it's a building material. [00:21:00] Look at the curve edges here where we've got the, uh, the cartoonists doing the drawings. Yeah. The decor across the bridge. This is a building material. The curved table where you get your coffees.

[00:21:14] Eric Goranson: for. And it fits on a bunch of different sizes. This isn't just a contemporary product. You can sit there and do some beautiful stuff. I've seen like that little pergola right there that's over the top of that coffee bar over there.

[00:21:31] Greg Cowan: tennis? Yes. So court one at Wimbledon is fully done in an envelo. Looks absolutely fantastic. The whole of

[00:21:44] Greg Cowan: That's

[00:21:52] Eric Goranson: Neither is through finance as you can

[00:22:02] Eric Goranson: next year. Okay. Nice.

[00:22:17] Martin Stevenson: this is exciting. I'm seeing that in this show. We've been, we've been talking to people from all over the country, from Maine to San Diego and all the way out to Hawaii and a lot of interest.

[00:22:30] Greg Cowan: So we're investing. We've got some. For our own team, Martin was the first meal board employee in the U S where it was like I think 20 or 22 ads on LinkedIn at the moment in the U S for roles. We've got your application. We consider you. We're not sure if you're an advocate yet, so we'll work our way through it.

[00:23:03] Greg Cowan: It's really exciting. Yeah, we got some great people here already. Yeah, no,

[00:23:24] Eric Goranson: Pop bottles and sawdust. Yeah. Yeah, it was like everything on the first try. It's not perfect. And Then they started coming out with the capped PVC stuff and it got better. Yeah, I call that second gen And then now you guys can come out and went all right now We're gonna look up make it look beautiful and have the durability built in Into it.

[00:23:46] Greg Cowan: Tru Simmons, our global marketing director, said, Greg, it's quite simple. I'm not talking about the competition. There used to be the Blackberry, there's now the iPhone as a comparison.

[00:24:01] Eric Goranson: They're like, yeah, I'm gonna die with this. This is it. I like the click. Yeah.

[00:24:13] Greg Cowan: point. Yeah, and I

[00:24:17] Eric Goranson: I learned that I didn't know about the, being able to form it, doing some stuff with what you guys are doing.

[00:24:39] Greg Cowan: That's when you know you're doing okay. Correct. Correct. You've made it. So we were starting to get.

[00:25:03] Eric Goranson: Do you have a team for that or how does that work? We have a

[00:25:20] Greg Cowan: It's not us. We think that would be a great color because I like that color and we've also got a great product team. And also when you've got a global business like we do, you get different insights

[00:25:36] Eric Goranson: Starting to come out with faucets in some of these colors. And you guys already have it on the wall in the building. You're already there on decking, right? So that's just shows how far ahead of the, of the game you are with that. Yeah. That beautiful lumen extrusion, the detail to this, then just very artistic.

[00:25:55] Martin Stevenson: that's the thing I'm really enjoying working here at IBS [00:26:00] and further afield in the States is, I've come to realize that within the decking industry, there's a, there's a real core of people who are, they're competing with each other a little bit. Oh, there's not even, they are.

[00:26:13] Greg Cowan: That's the British coming out of it. There

[00:26:32] Martin Stevenson: And in fact, we put one on the stand here where there's a river of light coming under the deck and it's just completely innovative. I've never seen anything like it. I was talking to somebody from Arizona who said with the, with the dry, uh, conditions down there in the climate that people are changing the way they have their yard and they're putting in rocks and light in there.

[00:27:02] Greg Cowan: not a rectangle anymore.

[00:27:10] Greg Cowan: to see it. You don't need to warm up the product to curve it.

[00:27:14] Eric Goranson: really simple to use. Well, wait a minute. Really? You don't have to go out and get the heat blankets. and go spend 10, 000 on the tools to go

[00:27:40] Martin Stevenson: And I was sitting in my chair gently hopping up and down thinking, no, you can just go and install it and bend the stuff because it's flexible enough to install a normal deck. temperatures. Back at Valentine's Day, Kevin Jeketh over at the builders in Rhode Island did a beautiful thing. He took a couple of strips of our flexible aging and he bent it [00:28:00] into a heart shape, made a Valentine's heart.

[00:28:21] Eric Goranson: that that is a great illustration of how different this product is.

[00:28:35] Martin Stevenson: over. Yep. You don't have to do that removal. You can cold bend it. Get out. That's crazy. Yeah.

[00:28:42] Eric Goranson: It's different, right? Because of that core, because of how it's made. You don't have to sit there and heat up all the plastics that, to make it work.

[00:29:00] Martin Stevenson: So, uh, the product is there to allow them to express themselves in the best way.

[00:29:17] Greg Cowan: a fascinating one

[00:29:20] Martin Stevenson: This was literally

[00:29:38] Greg Cowan: We're using the decks and having a massive coffee table made absolutely fantastic. You can see on the web, a new website, some of the mosaic styles that we're using as well. But I'll hand this to Martin. He has the best one to share with you. Just don't say the location.

[00:29:55] Martin Stevenson: You said he has a unique project and he wondered if our product would [00:30:00] work for it. And he was asking, could you wrap an aircraft hangar with millboard? And the answer was, of course we can. It's just a big barn. Yeah.

[00:30:11] Greg Cowan: is. But people are thinking about not just for standard product. Yeah.

[00:30:24] Eric Goranson: I want to be able to take them over there. They've been playing outside, wash the big dogs off real quick. It's a waterboard. It would work. It would work. Yep. That's what I mean. So we've got two dogs. Lab mix. This is double doodle type of labradoodle stuff, so. Yeah, I've got a miniature labradoodle. Okay.

[00:30:58] Eric Goranson: Yeah. And I'm thinking, [00:31:00] okay, we've got to be able to build this. So tired of sitting there for 20 minutes. with wet towels, trying to get them cleaned up so we don't get the rest of the house dirty. So it's like, all right, we're going to build this. We need a photo, please. All right. Put it on the website.

[00:31:28] Greg Cowan: finishes. It's a

[00:31:34] Martin Stevenson: I was amazed when I joined Millboard. I went over to the head office, and leading in from the front door of the office is a Millboard floor. And it gets incredible foot traffic with the number of people coming in and out of those offices. And the floor looks fantastic. But, uh, I asked somebody, How long installed down here on the floor.

[00:31:59] Greg Cowan: [00:32:00] that's, that's what I'm talking about. There's so many people

[00:32:10] Eric Goranson: I think it's. It's so fun with what you're starting to see with these big movable glass walls where you could literally put it as you're going outside and make it look like when you open the doors up for instance, you could bring the siding inside, bring it out, it still looks like finished wood inside, but now it's dragging your eye outside architecturally.

[00:32:29] Martin Stevenson: So, sorry, you go Mal. I've seen it. I've seen that in the house that got built in Joshua Tree, where effectively you're moving straight from an inside room to an outside room, and they're the same space, and absolutely stunning views. And you can imagine living there with the sun going down over the desert there, it would be just a beautiful place to enjoy your boards, and your drink out on the deck at night with the sun going

[00:32:54] Greg Cowan: So we've done a call at Wimbledon, we're about to do an aircraft hangar, what's our next challenge? You gotta give us a challenge. [00:33:00] We've done the dog wash.

[00:33:19] Eric Goranson: Hey, that was our idea. We had to keep this

[00:33:23] Eric Goranson: There we go. There we go. So what's next for you guys? This stuff you came out here, it's gotta be tough coming out with new products cause this here is spectacular. We can't talk about the stuff you

[00:33:41] Greg Cowan: Do you like how this has been built? Yeah. Did you ask Marcel what he's been doing on Thursday and Friday this week? And he's the marketing director. What are you doing on Thursday? So Friday this week, this

[00:33:57] Martin Stevenson: This room that we're sitting in. I assembled it. [00:34:00] Wow. Yeah.

[00:34:16] Greg Cowan: And as an Australian, I've done some long flights. This 12 hour flight is going to be my best. Absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:34:35] Eric Goranson: Yeah,

[00:34:55] Eric Goranson: help.

[00:35:04] Greg Cowan: get a computer system that says your call was very important to us, we'll come back to you in 45 minutes. Sorry, you've dialed at 5. 01, our office hours close at 5 o'clock, you won't get any of that. We're just, we're just trying to be really easy people to do business with. No question. To the values of the founders of the business.

[00:35:28] Eric Goranson: Yeah.

[00:35:36] Martin Stevenson: We launched a new one a couple of weeks ago. It's beautiful. On that website, millboard. com, you can order samples. We'll happily send you free, free, free, free, free samples. There we go. You can pick your colors, have a good browse through, and see what you like. See what catches your attention and we'll send them out to you and see how you're inspired

[00:35:57] Eric Goranson: And then you'll get a call and we'll help you from there. Yeah, [00:36:00] and I tell you what, this material is so easy to work with and that's what's so forgiving about it is that I like its flexibility when you're installing it because it's easy to work with. It's not too flexible, but it's That's the right amount of flexibility to work with it on the job site.

[00:36:16] Martin Stevenson: I can install it in this room like he's doing, it must be fairly easy to work with.

[00:36:24] Eric Goranson: That is great. Millboard. com. And then you guys are in distributors all across the U. S. right now. Yes, we do. And we're appointing

[00:36:32] Martin Stevenson: We

[00:36:36] Eric Goranson: well. There we go. I know we're only halfway through this. game, right? It's halftime.

[00:36:49] Greg Cowan: Yep. I'll let you off that one. If that's okay. Thank you very much. You've got the 5 30 a. m. One.

[00:36:59] Greg Cowan: morning. [00:37:00] You start early because you care and you get to have really good conversations and learn stuff.

[00:37:32] Greg Cowan: what is that?

[00:37:37] Eric Goranson: the way, if you don't ever want to have to paint your house again, here's

[00:37:43] Eric Goranson: Absolutely. Guys, thanks for coming on today. Is there anything we didn't

[00:37:51] Eric Goranson: talk about that next year.

[00:38:03] Greg Cowan: Yes, this is true. It's a secret. I guess that really narrows

[00:38:09] Greg Cowan: Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for coming and seeing us today. Alright,