Custom Approach

From Constraints to Confidence: How 9Wood Redefined Custom Wood Ceilings

Designers must balance creative freedom with project timelines, budget constraints, and the complexities of specialty finishes. 9Wood’s Custom Made Fast approach delivers predictable, configurable wood ceilings—making customization easier, visualization effortless and the joy of wood more accessible than ever.

The Challenge

In design and business, ideation is often seen as the starting point. The common belief is, “All innovation begins with creative ideas.” You can picture walls filled with sketches and Post-It notes—a classic Ideas-First approach. This was our method when we launched our manufacturing business, generating so many ideas we had to finally limit ourselves to four big ideas per year.

But here’s the problem: the Ideas-First approach frequently leads to uneven results. More ideas don’t necessarily lead to better solutions for customers—whether the customer is an owner (the architect’s customer) or a designer (9Wood’s customer). The flaws?

Poor Filtering

Without a deep understanding of client needs, decisions rely on intuition and precedent rather than clear criteria.

Client Uncertainty

Clients often struggle to articulate the solutions they need.

A Needs-First approach is a better approach but challenging to execute. Despite using classic architecture needs-discovery like interviews, surveys, goal-setting, and space mapping, we often missed the real needs of our design customers.

To some extent we were tone deaf because of our ambition. We launched 9Wood to create bespoke wood ceilings (Engineered-to-Order is the manufacturing term). But most designers lack the budget or time to work out fully customized designs, no matter how much they might like to work on such projects. One day we looked and realized 85% of our projects were not true one-offs—they were variations on standard products. Architects and designers were voting with their specifications, just as their clients were voting with their budgets and timelines. What was going on? Mark Young, a principal at Row and Brokaw and a 9Wood Board Advisor, gave us the clue: designers were looking for a sweet spot. He called these products “understandable and predictable” products. Products that allow custom design with predictable outcomes, avoiding the landmines that come with full bespoke projects.

Our Guides

Alvar Aalto’s biophilia: nature indoors with sustainable wood

Eli Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints: Leverage the bottleneck

To unlock “understandable and predictable” wood ceiling products we found ourselves relying on two important guides. Finnish architect Alvar Aalto was one. Mount Angel Abbey Library, one of only two US buildings he completed—and just an hour north from our Oregon factory—features an inspiring Hemlock Wood Grille ceiling. Aalto is an icon in Finland, with an impact felt from door pulls to urban landscapes. His designs incorporate many sustainability principles before the term became widespread. His preference for local, renewable materials like wood reflect his intuitive commitment to sustainability. After all, his father was a forester by profession, and Aalto grew up in the forests of Finland, one of the earliest countries to require replanting after logging (see Sustainable Wood Material Side Bar). His philosophy, which transcends academic categories, emphasized bringing nature into the built environment. He made the joy of wood accessible to everyone. Sustainable wood ceilings—especially with sound attenuation—fit perfectly within this vision some call humanist, organic, and modernist.

But it wasn’t just Aalto’s designs and use of materials that influenced our business. In 1927, Aalto teamed up with Otto Korhonen, who owned a furniture factory, to figure out how to fabricate Aalto’s bent plywood chairs for the Piamio Tubercular Sanitarium commission. Aalto and Korhonen became pioneers in the fabrication of configurable bent plywood furniture. Just as Korhonen Furniture Factory Ltd. fabricated Aalto’s furniture, we positioned 9Wood, Inc. to fabricate Aalto’s wood ceilings. 54% of our wood ceilings are still variations on an Aalto wood grille. True, our approach has evolved beyond Aalto to serving many design styles—yet his inspiration remains. We call him the Father of Wood Ceilings.

Just as Otto Korhonen tackled the challenge of bending plywood to realize Aalto’s furniture designs, we faced a similar problem: how to fabricate the custom wood ceilings our design customers were specifying—designs that were custom but not fully bespoke one-offs. On the other end of the spectrum, we wanted to help designers avoid the stressful scramble of settling for quick-ship or fast-track programs that compromised their vision.

This challenge led us to a second guiding influence: Eli Goldratt, whose principles helped shape our approach.

Goldratt, an Israeli physicist, wrote The Goal, one of the most influential business books of all time. He would pose a simple question that came with a counterintuitive answer. Let’s say a factory averages 10 widgets per hour through machine A, 10 through machine B, 10 through machine C, and 10 through machine D. What is the firm’s overall widget output? Most would say 10 widgets per hour. But that’s not possible. Why? Because there is natural variation at each machine. Some hours a machine might produce 12 widgets, sometimes only 8.

Goldratt demonstrated that one machine will always act as the firm’s bottleneck—the constraint that limits overall output. He called this insight the Theory of Constraints (TOC). Whether in architecting or manufacturing, the same principles of the bottleneck applies.

How can a firm improve effectiveness? The instinctive response is to balance resources across all the machines. But this is a mirage—it actually reduces flow. Work piles up in front of the bottleneck, and worse, when the bottleneck shifts unpredictably, it triggers multi-tasking, rework, and last-minute expedites (the architect’s all-nighters). Instead, the key to improvement is identifying and optimizing the true constraint—ensuring processes flow smoothly rather than unevenly. The Theory of Constraint’s impact on 9Wood has been substantial, allowing us to deliver rapid shop drawings and custom samples and 95 % on time product shipments (this is nearly a 100% higher performance than industry standards). It has proved so successful we were able to offer the industry’s only on time shipment guarantee for expedites: $1000/day for each day we miss our promised ship date up to the full value of the shipment.

Call to Action

Guided by the need of our architect and design customers for “understandable and predictable” products we uncovered an unmet need. This discovery didn’t come from an Ideas-First or even a Needs-First approach. Instead, it aligned with a Jobs-To-Be-Done approach:

Designers weren’t just hiring us to fabricate wood ceilings.

They needed better design tools and predictable yet  custom choices.

So, we focused on making wood ceilings more understandable through better visualization with the largest photo gallery on the internet. We improved predictability through a better configurator and faster sample ordering.

Success: Custom Made Fast

Our approach—Custom Made Fast—delivers understandable, predictable wood ceiling products that can be configured into hundreds of thousands of custom variations. Add custom stains, and the possibilities become infinite. And we aim for speed: speed of design assist services and speed of final product fabrication. We aim for this because wood ceilings are all we do.  
Think of us as devoted wood ceiling specialists.

Avoiding Failure

We see three categories in the specialty finishes business.

Quickship/aka Fast Track (911)

Supporting the expansion of forest certification is more important than supporting one over another competing certification program.

Bespoke (Highly Custom and Risky)

Exciting but costly, time-consuming, and prone to budget and schedule overruns.

Custom Fast (Design Freedom)

Predictable, understandable, yet still exciting—offering designers flexibility without the risks of fully bespoke projects.

Custom Made Fast is our offer in the Custom Fast category. It allows designers to choose from hundreds of thousands of custom configurations manufactured on spec and at speed, every time. From design to delivery, our approach means you can rely on 9Wood to help make your vision real and make the joy of wood accessible to everyone.