1 of 7
PAUL F WESLEY
2 of 7
PAUL F WESLEY
3 of 7
PAUL F WESLEY
4 of 7
PAUL F WESLEY
5 of 7
PAUL F WESLEY
6 of 7
PAUL F WESLEY
7 of 7
PAUL F WESLEY
by Bob Waite
Tague Lumber, known throughout the region for their quality and service, is a family business. Three generations continue a legacy of ownership that began over 100 years ago. Vincent Tague Sr., Vincent Tague Jr., Vincent Tague III and Madeline Tague are all descendants of James and Mary Tague, the founders of a company that began with two horses, a friend and a second-hand lumber lorry.
Vince Sr., remembers working as a teenager driving a truck for the original lumber business started by his grandfather James E. Tague in 1908. By then his father and uncles worked supplying lumber and wallboard (now called sheet rock or drywall) to builders throughout the Philadelphia area. “It was fun for me,” he says.
By being there in the early days of the business, Vince Sr. recognized that a family business could have some problems. He says, “I observed my uncles all working together and realized that it can be cumbersome. In my grandfather’s business everybody got a pay envelope, even the daughters who never went to work. I actually remember my father distributing these pay envelopes. It was an Irish custom, but you can only pay so many people.”
This custom of paying everyone in the family whether they worked or not is what Vince Sr. believes caused the business to close down for a short time. Vince Sr.’s father Joseph Tague reopened Tague Lumber with a small yard at 4010 Germantown Ave. in 1959. By 1968 Tague Lumber had to leave its Germantown Ave. location because the high school behind them needed a parking lot for the teachers. And Tague opened a larger facility on the corner of Belfield Ave. and High St. in the Germantown section of Philadelphia.
Vince Sr. became president of the company in 1973 and in 1985 Vince Jr., joined the company, and then following in his father’s footsteps became president in 2001. During this period Vince Sr. assumed the title of CEO. The company experienced much growth and expansion beyond the city limits of Philadelphia. In 1995 Tague acquired Phoenixville Lumber in Chester County, PA. The Phoenixville site allowed Tague to offer custom millwork and state-of-the art door hanging capabilities. In 1998 a third location was added when the Tague family purchased Marshall’s Lumber in Media, PA.
There are two versions of what happened when Vince Jr. became president. Vince Sr. says, “One day he walked in and said, “I want to become president, and I said, good, it’s all yours.” However Vince Jr. recalls, “I was doing a good job and one day my father walked in the office and said to me, ‘By the way, We are going to make you president.’ I thought to myself, What is this all about? So that was it.”
“Vince Jr.”, his father says, “became in charge of all the heavy stuff, and I pretty much am in charge of the real estate and the equipment—anything that doesn’t talk back.” This includes the five lumber yards, a commercial door division, a custom mill shop, two showrooms, a pre-hung door shop and a remarkable fleet of shiny red trucks— everything from 6-story boom trucks, flat beds, Moffetts, to box trucks and service vans.
After Vince Jr. became president, the company underwent more expansion. Now the company has eight locations, one of which is a commercial door shop that is not on the radar of most of their regular customers. Tague has locations in Philadelphia, Malvern, Kennett Square, Media, Phoenixville, Malvern (Premier Commercial Door, Frame & Hardware), Malvern (Tague Design Showroom) and the newest, Doylestown / Plumsteadville, which is here in Bucks County.
The Doylestown location, which opened in 2017 is what Tague Lumber calls a “hybrid site. It is the first site that is not only a fully stocked lumber yard with drive-thru warehouses, but it also features a 4,500 plus square foot design showroom with full-size kitchen and bath vignettes, plus functional displays of windows, doors, molding, millwork, Architectural hardware, and more.
Before completion of the Doylestown showroom in the fall of 2017, the only showroom that Tague owned was in Malvern, Pennsylvania. The difference between the two is that the Doylestown showroom is also connected to a full-service lumber yard. The combination kitchen and bath showroom with window and door displays plus a lumber yard is unique to the Doylestown location. Not only does Doylestown have a kitchen and bath showroom, but it also has professionally certified designers on staff who have been featured in many magazines and national television, including Good Morning America’s “Award-Winning Home Makeovers” and HGTV’s “Renovations.”
Madeline Tague, after graduating from college and working in a different industry for a few years joined the company in 2019 and began working at the Doylestown location. She learned about bath and kitchen design but realized in time, “It just wasn’t for me.” More interested in communications and marketing, Madeline now works from the Germantown location as the social media coordinator while also developing a computer platform to allow customers to make orders online 24/7. “They would be able,” she says, “to select their products online so they would be working with the sales associate that they already work with, making it a much easier for the customer.” In some the promotional aspects of her job, she is on the road a photographing jobs and taking pictures of deliveries.
Vincent Tague III, Madeline’s brother joined the company in 2016, but prior to that he says, “I first worked at the lumber yard while in high school and college, I worked the entire summer of my junior year and senior year at college. I decided I wanted to be a part of the family business. So my dad said that rather than coming in right away, ‘I want you to work somewhere else.’ So I went to one of our suppliers out on the west coast—International Board Incorporated. I worked in the mills for them and did some quality control stuff. They showed me the sales side of the business, how they trade lumber on their trading board.”
Vince III, however became more interested in the construction side of the business. He says, “I gravitated to the construction side of the business, so my father sent me to a similar family business as ours—Jackson Lumber in Lawrence Massachusetts, run by a similar family and a multi-generational family business.” However, now he is working on the sales side of the business and took a position at Premier, the commercial division of Tague Lumber.
“I am at Malvern at our commercial workshop in Malvern, which we call Commercial Doors. This includes doors for schools, office buildings, department stores and so on.” Vince III says.
Being the owners of a large regional lumber company, it would seem that they would see each other a lot, but as Vince Sr. frankly says, “We don’t. We never see each other except at family gatherings. We work separately.”
Vince Sr. and Vince Jr. do in fact work from the same Media location. Vince Sr. says, “We do have our headquarters in Media Pennsylvania and Vince and I both have offices there. He’s there every day and I am seldom there. But when I am in the office it’s there. And that’s where we have our boardroom—where we have our manager’s meeting and that sort of thing.”
Vince Jr. adds, “It is our most centrally located division but it’s still too small to fit everybody in there, and that’s a problem. We don’t have a central area now where we can plug accounting, HR, marketing and advertising, purchasing. I’d love to bring it all together some day.”
Madeline thinks that it is good for the company that the Tagues aren’t all in the same location. “There is an advantage in being spread around, people like to see a Tague in as many locations as possible.”
Speaking of the how things have changed as the company has grown, Vince Jr. says, “When we had 200 employees I still knew everyone’s name. Now I pass some and I have no clue. That’s not a good feeling for me. I will say this. We rely on our management team and we are blessed to have management that we do.”
Vince Jr. continues to explain, “We sometimes don’t talk for a week. When I came into the business in 1985 my father and I worked side by side every day. We would go to lunch together and talk a lot about the business and where we wanted the business to go. I miss those days, but my father and I think a lot alike naturally. People around here think we’re crazy. He’ll show up and say, ‘Hey what the matter with that thing?’ Then I’ll show up two days later and say, ‘You know that thing is just not right.’ And they’ll go, ‘Yeah the old man was just here and told us that.’”
The Tagues do meet for all the important decisions about the company. Vince Jr. says, “I think our family could meet more on a regular basis. But we have an understanding and we meet and talk enough that we know the direction of the company. We talk about geographical locations, where we might want to expand to, a manufacturing facility which surfaces. And what we want to do next—what we’re looking at. Currently we’re looking at some new logos. We do that collectively.”
Vince Jr. says, “We are not allowed to talk shop at family gatherings.” Madeline interjects, “That’s not one hundred percent true. We sneak it in, in spite of the prohibition. We really don’t see each other from day to day. People always say, when you go to work you get to see your family. Well, I see my other co-workers more than them, so we talk about work even at family gatherings.”
The Tague family takes pride in their products. One that they especially are exuberant about is their molding. Vince Jr. explains, “We probably outsell any other lumber company within a hundred mile radius. Everybody refers to our lumber as TL and a number and TL stands for Tague Lumber. If you go into any company, they pull out a Tague Lumber molding guide.”
Tague Lumber fits the needs of builders, designers, architects and homeowners. They are proud of their heritage and the five lumber yards, commercial door division, custom mill shop, two showrooms and pre-hung door shop. Their history, expansion and growth are a result of offering a quality product to builders, designers and consumers in an ever expanding area.
Tague Lumber & Tague Design Showroom is located at 6100 Easton Road, Plumsteadville, PA. For more information or call 215-348-9408. For more information about Tague Lumber, visit www.taguelumber.com.
Bob Waite is the editor of Bucks County Magazine.