WOOD WILLING’S OLAOHA EZEJA
Few years ago, Olaoha Ezeja gathered Nigeria’s most passionate woodworkers to make furniture, doors, flooring from solid wood, and then created a platform to sell these wood products in www.woodwill.i.ng. This platform has quickly grown to become the main destination for Nigerians searching online for high quality wood furniture, wood flooring, doors and partitions, staircase and railing products, wood wall cladding, wood ceiling, kitchen cabinets for homes, offices, hotels, restaurants, churches, and schools.
The question is, why have Nigerians chosen to order online what they can mostly get from a roadside carpenter in their neighborhood?
Wood products by Wood Willing are made from seasoned woods, and most notably from premium species like Iroko, Mahogany, Gmelina, and Teak; unlike in roadside workshops’ where any available timber is used in making finished products without passing through kiln drying and chemical treatment which are what guarantee the stability and durability of a finished wood product.
Wood Willing get her woods as logs from the forest, then saw the logs into smaller dimensions for effective seasoning. The seasoned timbers are eventually machined into furniture parts, wood flooring planks, wood ceiling strips, wood door panels, staircase handrails, balusters, and newel posts, etc.
Established at the easing of the COVID-19 restrictions of year 2020 as a supplier of wood handrail to building contractors across the country, Wood Willing have grown in leaps and bounds to become the nation’s foremost woodwork platform, selling hundreds of wood products over the internet monthly, and hosting the nation’s best woodworkers in production facilities in 3 states, with hundreds of projects completed successfully in over 20 states.
How Wood Willing Was Founded
After the inevitable failure of his then online venture was immediately followed by the tumultuous spread of the COVID-19 in 2020, Olaoha Ezeja was one of those who went into the famous lockdown with no source of living. Still armed with his PC, Ezeja quickly saw an opportunity in the lockdown. He joined his elder brother’s building materials retail business, but not as just another salesperson at the physical shop. He rather sought to promote the products on their physical shop over the internet during the lockdown by first of all building a web platform for it. The website was hurriedly built, and a day after the launch, an enquiry came in; but it was not for a product in their physical shop: it was for wood handrail.
Ezeja collaborated with local carpenters to make wood handrails to fulfill this first order; and despite that the wood handrails were eventually rejected for being made out of unseasoned wood, and being badly finished, his love for making stylish products out of solid wood was birthed, and has continued to grow ever since.