I have written many a time about Luoman Log Homes (here and here). They came out to the market with a log mobile home and had great plans to take over the world and especially the North American market.

Like vrs. Love
I liked the TV ads, which they ran in relation to the mobile campaign and the product was functional. Unfortunately ”like” and ”functional” aren’t apparently deciding factors when people are making their mobile home purchasing decisions - try ”love” and ”beautiful” instead. What are your critical buying factors?

Failing to create a market
Looks like the pricing was a tad too high for this mobile home model and as they rolled it out as a product launch, they probably used reserved marketing budget before realizing any marked number of orders. It is difficult to innovate new products in log home industry.

Copycats in action
Think about it, isn’t it so that in any given style segment of log homes (rustic, modern, Scandinavian etc.) it is really hard to tell the difference between the manufacturers. Almost every day I come across the situation where customer comes and shows me the plans of some other log home manufacturer and asks to get a quotation of such a home. What do you think, can you distinguish between log home manufacturers by e.g. looking photos?

Collective development
It is virtually impossible to protect models, one can try, but then there are some slight changes in those final blueprints and hands are washed. This is just the way of the industry. But here we also find the secret of log home product development. Those tiny tweaks that we make to designs of other manufacturers, steadily inch the industry forward. We learn from others and with our fierce competition we collectively develop our product.

Lessons learned
What we can learn from Luoman Log Homes is that it can be costly to develop a brand new product category. One must have deep pockets to support the maturity of the segment and educating customers about new possibilities. I have no doubt that someday mobile log homes are a strong niche segment among log homes.

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Long time ago Mr. Mac Laird wrote in comments about his history as a log home enthusiast. I decided to check out his website to read more about his experiences as a log cabin builder. Interestingly, it turns out the site is mostly about bark canoe (test) building and bow/arrow raw material collecting.

Storyteller
Mr. Mac Laird has written a book about the old days and old ways. Instead of making a boring school book he has chosen to write in narrative manner, bit like being a grand father telling a story to kids. You can’t avoid learning some tips and tricks about living in the great outdoors, good point if you normally start to feel tired after glancing through the index of any given encyclopedic log home book. Tempo seems to be mellow, making it a good companion before bedtime (hey, in a GOOD way).

Slow tempo of log cabin living
Can you relate to canoeing or bow shooting? I can, because I have started to kayak and canoe on the river that flows right on my backyard. Swallows squeak happily as they swoosh by. Fish jump as if to say that they know I don’t have fishing rod with me. I just might have caught some kind of log cabin fever, because we all (yep, people who live in log home or log cabin) tend to have similar hobbies or habits. Is it contagious? Well, I have been thinking to purchase myself a fine bow. Keep updated about my mission to purchase a bow and subscribe to my feed.

Here in Finland a landmark legal case is brewing about forest treatment. Single forest owner is being accused of mismanaging his forest.

According to the government dictated forestry regulations, one can only cut as much as sustainable development requires. What do you think that means in practise?

It means that if the owner wants to leave the forest into natural state, owner is allowed to do that. However, if the owner wants to cut trees, owner must follow the law about forest treatment. The law states very clearly, how many trees there must be left standing and how big they should be. After this comes whole slate of different treatment measures. This bureaucratic system leads into forest cultivation, is that sustainable development?

In this case, the enforcing forestry official says that the area, which was cut, should have been cut almost to the bare bones, then treat the soil and plant pine trees instead of firs that used to be dominant tree on the location.

Government now demands 10 000 euro from the forest owner, because he cut only the biggest trees and left everything else on natural state. Owner now wonders the rigid practise, because he has been managing his forests in the same traditional manner for over fifty years and they all grow just fine.

Any cumbersome laws limiting forest management on your area?

Montana Tom is one of those people who took part into linkdonating project. Tom is running a directory where you can find information about log homes and log cabins, based on location and category. If you can’t find the company to suit your needs from this directory, then you are in the beginning of a very long search. He placed the link over here.

This is a post that fits nicely to my article about log cabin rentals in Finland. I found it from a site that took part into linkdonating project.

Let’s say you own that vacation log cabin, but are facing the problem of distance. You only visit the cabin few times a year and more than just couple of days at each time. Rest of the year it goes unused, and bit like money under mattress it doesn’t earn interest. As you can see in the post, it is very important to understand local markets.

Log cabin used to be a family affair in Finland. Everybody seemed to have that special log cabin somewhere on the countryside. Log cabins were self-built and maintained, big part of the fun being slate of chores needed to keep the cabin in shape. That has changed.

Nowadays the traditional approach on log cabins has stagnated and a new trend has overtaken the old way of spreading log homes to deep forests by lakes and rivers. Today the idea is to get a carefree vacation cabin that doesn’t need constant attention like log cabins used to need. Solution has been to focus on building new log cabins around skiing resorts. Around these resorts, cabins locate side by side, making it easy and profitable for service industry to take care of the cabins. Owners can forget maintenance and hit the slopes, go motor sledging, cross-country skiing etc.

How this has changed the log cabin industry? Prices have rocketed. Skiing resorts are mostly in Finnish Lapland, which basically is galaxy far, far away, no matter from where you look at it. It is not possible to build and maintain the cabin anymore, because of the distance. Distance is also the reason, why these cabins would be empty most of the year. When we combine the high price of such resort log cabin home, the difficulty of visiting it, and the couple of weeks usage that any given log cabin has - we get log cabin rentals. More and more Finns rent their log cabins during the time they are not using cabins by themselves. The variety of log cabin rentals in Lapland, Finland is at all time high.

All this is good news for travelers. When people visit skiing resorts in Finland they have much improved selection of accommodation, which in turn increases the volume of travelers. Finally increased traveler volume brings more possibilities for entrepreneurs, therefore services become more readily available. For now Lapland vacation log cabin sector is booming and there is slight bubble developing, but in the long term, prices will level off and Lapland’s tourism sector can enjoy steady flow of travelers.

Here are the linkdonaters for Kiva:

De Stichting Werkgroep Urgenta
Log Cabin Directory
Leavenworth Washington Real Estate

Blog about your blog

The first linker is a non-governmental organization, called The Urgenta Foundation. Following is an excerpt from their website: “The Urgenta Foundation is a Dutch non-profit volunteer charity organization (NGO) engaged in community development aid to Eastern European developing countries like Romania and Moldova.”

As you can see, this is a perfect match as through Kiva one can micro-finance projects in Eastern Europe. I know this might not bring much added value for those of you that are surfing this site because of log homes, but I promise it will remain the main focus of the site.

Ok, one dollar going for Kiva and 999 more pending, deadline being the last of February. Then it is time to change the project. Let’s see how much we get to donate in links and in money.

I must disappoint you, because there is no specific and right way to get a log home or log cabin. However I try to demonstrate how to build a log home. I will show the process from the start to finish and explain the details and motivation. There will be pictures, video, articles and interviews that document the whole project from the idea to the finished log home.

I am able to do this, because it’s me who is going to build the log home. Time frame is staggering because I have reserved three years for the whole project, starting from the beginning of the year 2007. I don’t know how many of you will have the patience to follow the progress or the lack of it, but I publish the information here anyway.

I remember the first time that I was dealing with Americans. Whenever I met people on the street that I knew, they said, “Hi, how are you doing?” I stopped there in the middle of the road “Well, now that you asked…” but they didn’t stop neither looked back they just kept on walking to the opposite direction. I wondered why they pretended to be interested but then just walked away?

That above memory came to my mind when I was reading an article at Seth Godin. He tells an example about corporate communication that sets expectations high. If you listen to the customer but don’t act accordingly, you will leave them standing on the street wondering whether to keep on walking or running after a real communication.

For few times I have sat in a development meeting where customer feedback has been the topic of the day. Just as many times the conclusion of those meetings has been that we need to change our marketing communication to better fit the image that customers have on us. We promised to deliver in seven days, but too often the delivery was few days late. Solution: we started to talk about two weeks as a delivery time. Problem solved. My experience is that customer feedback rarely changes business operations.