Southern Indiana Business September-October 2020 | Page 30

FAMILY OWNED
Michael Teives, Warehouse Manager, stands near towering racks of wood slabs at the M&M Tabletops warehouse in New Albany.
Photo by Bill Hanson
Timber
Tales
Mitchell Veneer has
distributed products
around the globe
By Valerie Zell
Photos by Bill Hanson
When most of us look at a piece of wood
veneer furniture, we see the color, texture,
and how well it matches with its intended
space. Michael Teives sees those things,
too, but he also sees the specific species of wood, the
quality of workmanship and the precision of the seams.
He might even herald a guess at where the tree once
grew.
It’s an occupational hazard for someone who’s worked
around wood for the past 10 years. As the warehouse manager
for Mitchell Veneer in New Albany, Teives oversees
a huge inventory of raw wood veneer -- wood that’s been
cut, processed, and sliced paper-thin in preparation for
being glued into sheets and pressed onto plywood or other
substrate for a wood finish.
“White oak, walnut, hickory, maple, red oak, and
cherry,” Teives ticked off on his fingers. “We focus on the
domestic hardwoods.” In the past, they’ve also cut ash,
pine, hackberry and other species.
Mitchell Veneer is a distributor, which puts them somewhere
in the middle of the wood supply chain. When trees
are logged (either by suppliers or from Mitchell’s own
stock of timber), they’re stored at a 25-acre concentration
site in Henryville. From there, the logs are classified and
30 September / October 2020