SmartLam Relaunches As SmartLam North America

Cross-laminated timber producer SmartLam has expanded as SmartLam North America under new leadership and investment from Brian Fehr, Erik Munck and SmartLam founder Casey Malmquist.

SmartLam North America has established its headquarters in Columbia Falls, Mont., and has acquired the state-of-the-art, formerly IB XLam CLT facility in Dothan, Ala. With two operational production facilities in Montana and Alabama, SmartLam North America reports it will immediately lead the industry with a combined capacity of 6 million cubic feet of annual CLT production.

The company has also commenced planning for additional CLT manufacturing facilities strategically located in major wood baskets from coast to coast. It aims to open three more locations by 2022, targeting new plants in the Northeast, West Coast, and timber-rich Southeast. The combined operational facilities will allow the company to produce more than 17.2 million cubic feet of annual CLT production

The company states, “SmartLam North America will leverage its proprietary design, engineering, project management, project delivery model with its expansive, modern, and fully automated, state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities to offer the full range of mass timber solutions needed for a comprehensive and integrated customer experience.”

The company adds, “SmartLam North America is dedicated to sustainable forest management, supporting climate and carbon-friendly building materials, and providing innovative construction solutions via extensive geographic distribution through regional production plants.”

CLT has rapidly gained traction within the past decade in North America among builders, engineers and architects because it is extremely durable, cost-effective, compliant with current building codes, and incredibly sustainable. It also vastly improves the speed of build and allows builders to construct and complete projects faster, with a fraction of the labor, using the only renewable building material, according to SmartLam.

Fehr has spent more than 40 years on the timber supply side of the market, including co-founding BID, a sawmill maintenance and construction firm that boomed in recent years, following acquisitions of several sawmill equipment companies, into a turnkey supplier of sawmills, including several that have been built in recent years and that are currently being built in the Southeast U.S.

Munck brings 30 years of experience in the engineered wood product sector. Malmquist’s 40-year career has been spent on the market side of the building industry. He was a co-founder of SmartLam in 2012, the same year the company became the first producer of CLT in the U.S.

“We are thrilled to launch SmartLam North America to evolve the role that mass timber products has in transforming the building industry, and to ensure that North America plays a dominant role in the movement,” Malmquist says.  “Mass timber just got a whole lot stronger. Combining SmartLam’s historic presence in the mass timber market, an accomplished leader like Brian Fehr, and a significant investment in the enterprise, we welcome the work that needs to be done in solidifying North America’s place in the global mass timber market.”

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