From wooden fruit boxes to telephone poles and finger-joint boards, the Gorman Brothers company has managed to survive and grow for 75 years in the Okanagan by developing niche and specialty wood products.
The family-owned wood business, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary in business this year, recently started a new chapter in its long, steady growth story when it acquired a sawmill and forest tenure from Weyerhaeuser for $120 million.
The acquisition includes the former Weyerhaeuser sawmill in Princeton, which has been rebranded as Similkameen Forest Products, and forest tenure totaling 682,000 cubic metres.
The tenure comes in the form of Tree Farm Licence (TFL) 59, two replaceable forest licenses in the Merritt region, and one replaceable licence in the Okanagan timber supply area.
While that sounds like a lot of timber, in practice the actual allowable cut won’t come anywhere near the theoretical annual allowable cut.
“That’s what we picked up theoretically on paper with the operation in Princeton,” said Gorman Brothers CEO Nick Arkle. “But that’s not what we’re getting, because there’s allowable annual cut reductions coming at us.
“And so, when all of those go through, the volume is going to be considerably less than what was identified in the documents.”
Even so, having that much tenure on paper does give the company more certainty and allows for better planning.
While the sale agreement was struck nearly a year ago, in May 2025, the tenure transfer was only recently approved by B.C. Forests Minister Ravi Parmar, who said he was happy to see Crown forest tenure transferred to a local B.C. company.
“For too long, most major milling operations have been the realm of big industrial conglomerates,” he said in a news release.
With the acquisition, Gorman Brothers now own and operate six sawmills and specialty mills.
That includes the Gorman Brother Lumber mill just outside of West Kelowna, a cedar mill in Revelstoke, a plywood mill in Salmon Arm and a mill near Lumby that makes telephone poles.
Until the recent purchase of the Princeton mill, Gorman Brothers was one of the few sawmillers in B.C. that did not produce conventional structural lumber like two-by-fours.
It produces mainly “appearance grade” interior and exterior boards for home finishing and renovation – ceiling and soffit boards, wainscotting and trim, decking and siding.
“Princeton is very much our first introduction to more of a commodity lumber type operation,” Arkle said.
The company used to buy lumber from the Weyerhaeuser mill and cut it to make specialty boards. It made economic sense to buy the mill outright and close the loop on the supply and value chain.
The tenure that comes with the Weyerhaeuser is also an important part of that supply chain. The TFL-59 is particularly important, as it is a type of tenure that gives exclusive harvesting and management rights to a defined area of working forest.
“The advantage to a TfL is that you can do some nifty stuff on the land, which may potentially increase the harvest,” Arkle said. “Theoretically, it’s a more secure licence in that it has a longer term attached to it.”
Whereas tree farm licenses are area-based, replacement forest licenses are volume based. Licence holders must compete with other licensees in a timber supply area to obtain the timber they need to feed their mills.
Parmar wants to see the province move away from volume-based replacement forest licences altogether.
“In the long run, what I want to move towards is that area-based, where you have dedicated areas, long-term agreements that allow folks to be able to move towards doing that full-rotation area-based management,” he told me.
From fruit trees to lumber mills
The Gorman Brothers’ story has always involved trees of one variety or another.
Brothers Ross and John Gorman were originally in the fruit growing business and owned an orchard in the Okanagan.
In 1949, after their orchard froze in a particularly bitter winter, they needed to make some money and started making wooden fruit boxes to sell to other fruit growers.
In 1953, they bought a sawmill and started down the road of forestry, which was starting to boom in B.C.
The company slowly grew slowly over the years through acquisitions of other wood manufacturing operations focused on specialty wood products.
In the early 2000s, the Ross Gorman family bought out the John Gorman family.
To this day, seven members of the Gorman family still work in the business, which employs about 1,000 people, not counting logging contractors.
Arkle joined the family business in 1974 at the age of 18, and then married into the family.
He grew up in the UK, but got to know the Gorman family through a female cousin, who had moved to Canada and married a Gorman. Ross Gorman invited Arkle to come work for his company for a summer, after he finished high school.
“I came out (for) what I thought would only be three months, and ended up staying for 50 years now,” he said.
At Ross Gorman’s urging, Arkle decided to go to university and get a degree in forestry.
He went to BCIT and then UBC to get a degree in forestry, and then married Ross Gorman’s daughter, Louise. The two had been at university together.
“After we finished university, we went traveling for a year around the world,” Arkle said.
He had it in mind to come back to Canada and go work for MacMillan Bloedel.
“But while we were on our trip, we got a letter from her dad saying there was a position opening up in the woodlands department back here at Gormans. Would I be interested?
“And my wife, being the solid Okanagan girl that she is, said, ‘Yeah, let’s do that.'”
Arkle spent the next few decades as Gorman’s forester and woodlands manager.
The company has managed to survive and even grow through a challenging period when many sawmills in B.C. have shuttered, due to a lack of fibre, low lumber prices and American tariffs and duties.
The company’s strength lies partly in its specialization and diversification.
“We were the first to get into finger jointing — taking the trim ends and putting them together,” Arkle said. “Now a lot of people do that, but we were one the first and so that was indicative of their thinking.”
There is also strength in the business’s family structure.
“It wasn’t an archetypal type management structure, and so that really allowed people to go out there and be as creative as they want to be,” Arkle said.
“We have a family that recognizes that the forest industry has looked after it very well, committed to the communities that they’re in. They make decisions thinking long term.”
About 10 years ago, Arkle stepped up to serve as co-CEO with a brother-in-law. After his brother-in-law retired six years ago, Arkle became CEO.
Now 68, he’s about to step aside from that role. He will be handing over the CEO role to Ashley Cribb, an American with three decades of experience in the forest products sector.
“I‘m not heading to the sunset,” he said. “My role is changing. I won’t be active hands-on, day-to-day operation stuff, but I am moving into chairman of the board.”
Nelson Bennett’s column appears weekly at Resource Works News. Contact him at [email protected]
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