Navigating GL Veneer’s New Website: Part 1

At GL Veneer, we’re always looking to improve, to build on our momentum, to find ways to get better. Whether it’s how we help you spec the right Custom Plywood, order the perfect Live Edge Slab, or make our website easier for you to use — with more features, more utility, and more insight.

Which is exactly what we just did. And why we’re so proud to announce the new and improved glveneer.com — our 2.0 version.

Now, as you roam through GL Veneer’s digital forest, you can learn about the 100+ species in our inventory, dig through our extensive Log Blog series, and shop our various product lines — easier and quicker than ever.

Updated and expanded, our new website is now an even more engaging GL Veneer brand experience, drawing on the strengths of our previous site, while adding a lot of awesome new content – including a deep-dive species database – to help you find the right GL products at the right price.

More than simply improving the actual retail process – which we did, and walk you through in Part 2 of this Log Blog: Online Shopping Tips  – we’ve added sections and resources to help inspire your passion for wood, educate you about our many species, introduce you to new wood applications and techniques, and expand your knowledge of our product lines so you can design, plan, and incorporate wood from GL Veneer into your best work ever.

Here are some of the new sections and features you’ll find on the new GL Veneer website:

You don’t have to be an expert to know there only two fundamental types of trees in the world — hardwoods and softwoods. But between them, there are more than 60,000 different species throughout nature. And within each unique species, the color, grain, and look can vary quite a bit from tree to tree.

On the revamped GL Veneer website, our new Wood Species page now helps you makes sense of, and understand, the many possibilities and permutations of wood available to you. Featuring a visual tapestry of the more than 100 species available in the GL Veneer inventory – as Wood Veneer Sheets, Live Edge Slabs, or in most instances both – you now have an easy-to-use, yet in-depth resource at your fingertips.

On the main page, you’ll find each species in alphabetical order represented by a striking thumbnail image of the wood’s typical color, grain, and figure. And we still have the filters that help you zero in on the exact type of wood you’re looking for — Light, Medium, Dark, or GL Reserve. Click on the thumbnail or name of any species and you’ll be taken to a thorough description of that tree type with insight that might help inform or expand your project’s design narrative, including:

Of course, spec’ing the right material for any particular job isn’t always easy, so you’ll also get a description of each species’ wood characteristics and insightful factors like:

But there’s more. Because the only thing we love as much as wood … is talking about wood. So, many of the species pages in the library also include links to “Species Feature” videos we’ve created that showcase facts and insights about that particular wood. They were fun to make. Hopefully you find them fun to watch, while also getting rare peeks inside our warehouse.

Finally, if you find you’re interested in buying Wood Veneer Sheets of the species you’re reading up on, we include a list of all the available retail SKUs of that particular species currently in stock — right there on the page. Just click the veneer image/name and it will take you to the retail shopping page for that product SKU, where you can quickly start the purchasing process that we outline in Part 2 of this Log Blog.

Before this 2.0 update, the GL Veneer website was mainly used to display our Wood Veneer Sheets and Live Edge Wood Slabs available for purchase. Now, it’s also an educational hub for all things wood — and everything GL.

Central to this hub is the GL Veneer Log Blog, which we write to give you the inside scoop on all kinds of wood related topics:

Reading the Log Blog, you’ll learn about the industry, find inspiration for new projects and applications, and relive countless stories of some of our most eventful projects and adventures since 1977 — most of them actually true!

From salvaging giant slabs to the sustainable characteristics of veneer to, yes, navigating our new website — you’ll find a Log Blog (or two) sharing our three generations’ worth of insight and experience on just about everything you can imagine. With new installments being written and posted on a regular basis.

Since 1977, GL Veneer has transformed the most incredible natural resource into some of the most amazing new things. And while we love this business no matter what, it isn’t always easy — the solutions aren’t always obvious.

In fact, at GL we live for the tough jobs, the challenges, the types of projects others call impossible. And helping our customers succeed in reaching their vision makes it all the more gratifying. From massive jobs to small projects, public spaces to private residences, every time our products are chosen, it’s a heartening and humbling testament to the beauty of wood.

But words alone can’t capture just how stunning the final results can be. Or the imagination required to solve the “unsolvable.” So we’ve added a new Projects We’ve Done section to our revamped website.

Through a gallery of amazing photos, we showcase each of the more notable projects we supplied the wood material for. Each on a dedicated page. Each giving you a look at the amazing outcome, the quality of the GL Veneer materials in their final form, and the incredible craftsmanship the designers and builders used to bring their vision to life.

When we’re not helping our customers find the perfect wood products for their projects, we’re just like you — people with personal email addresses that get jammed up with Spam. Yep, like you, we get tons of unsolicited, totally irrelevant marketing emails with advertisements and promos for stuff we don’t want, need, and never signed up for.

And we delete it all just as quick as you do.

In our opinion, any email you receive from a company – including GL Veneer – should always bring you some value. When you see it in your inbox, it should perk you up, even create some excitement for you to open and read it, knowing there’s something interesting, relevant, important, maybe even exciting or surprising for you to learn about or discover. Bottom line: every email should contain something you care about, something worth your time, something of value — to you.

Following that philosophy with the GL Veneer newsletter, we’re constantly working to curate the best online woodworking publication available — to share more of our knowledge, experience, and opinions with people who can truly gain something from them.

Granted, our newsletter is more than a monthly email — it’s more like your exclusive “backstage” pass to the Home of Wood. After opting in to receive it, the GL Veneer newsletter will hit your inbox the first week of every month. A quick, easy read, it’ll feature things like: