Creating innovative tools for tree care and handling firewood: Behind the Business with LogOX in Arlington, VT

LogOX | Our Family of Better Businesses

BBB Member, LogOX, is a family-owned, American-made forestry tools company.

LogOX is a family-owned, Small Business Association (SBA) certified and Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB) based in Arlington, Vermont. The company specializes in selling completely American-made forestry tools and firewood heating products, many of which are designs they’ve developed in-house, for anyone who works with a chainsaw, log splitter, portable sawmill, and/or heats their home with firewood.

The LogOX story began with Jon Roberts, a Vermont man with a near-40-year corporate career and background in chemical engineering, who had worked his way up to becoming the chief operating officer at an international company. One day in June 2016, Roberts found himself unexpectedly part of a restructuring and massive company-wide layoff. “Unfortunately, the rumors are true, when it comes to job hunting in your early 60s. Companies rarely want to take on someone with decades of experience and commensurate salary for a new leadership position that late in their career,” said his son and LogOX co-founder Austin Roberts about his father’s situation, at the time.

However, this professional disruption turned out to be the catalyst for beginning an entirely new career and lifestyle. Jon and his wife, Lynne, were happy living in Vermont, but they didn’t like Jon’s daily three-hour, round-trip commute. “While job hunting, he kept busy working on a project near and dear to his heart—refining a forestry tool prototype that was already making his own weekend firewood harvesting easier,” said Austin Roberts. 

Many people who live in Vermont or another forested area harvest local firewood to heat their homes. At the Roberts’ residence, after their two children grew up and left home, it became solely Jon and Lynne’s job to handle the annual harvesting and stacking of firewood to heat their log home. One of the things that frustrated them about chopping, carrying, and storing firewood was the lack of good hand tools. 

“Cutting and maneuvering heavy logs is hard on the body. The hand tools available before LogOX made the work only slightly easier, especially for people getting older. Jon wanted to improve that with a better and more ergonomic design,” explained Austin Roberts. 

After felling damaged trees on his property, Roberts would buck them into rounds and hoist them onto a wood splitter by hand with a pulp hook, before splitting them into firewood. Lifting the rounds off the ground and onto the splitter is where he first saw room for improvement. It led him to develop what would become the LogOX Hauler and later the 3-in-1 Forestry MultiTool, which created a 40-inch cant hook and timberjack by adding attachments to the hauler. 

In his early days working with his LogOX prototype, Jon Roberts remarked, “This firewood harvesting hand tool was compact and portable. When using it, I no longer had to bend over to load my log splitter and move log rounds. The LogOX made handling firewood much easier on my back, and Lynne saw its potential as a commercial product. She convinced me to pursue a patent and find a manufacturing partner for it.”

About the same time as Jon Roberts was developing what would become the LogOX 3-in-1 Forestry MultiTool, his son Austin Roberts was completing his Active Duty service in the United States Army and figuring out his next career move. 

“Our career paths intersected as I got out of the military, not really knowing precisely what I wanted to do. Meanwhile, he [Jon Roberts] was in the process of looking for another job similar to his previous one,” recalled the younger Roberts. Austin also saw the potential in the tool’s commercial appeal and agreed that his family should make a concerted effort to market it. In late 2016 he joined his parents in launching the company as a co-founder and general manager. 

“We divvied up the work based on our own strengths. I do the sales and marketing work and manage the website. Jon is a former COO and chemical engineer, so he became the R&D and operations lead. Our president Lynne takes care of business development and customer service. But we all wear multiple hats, like many entrepreneurs.” he said.

After patenting their product and finding a manufacturing partner in the US, to get the word out about their new forestry tool, the trio exhibited it at trade shows. “Initially, it was county fairs and industry expos. Then we really started to directly market it to consumers online.”

Social media, especially YouTube, was essential to their early marketing efforts, according to Austin. “We worked with channels in our niche to get the product in front of folks. We've never paid for reviews, but we have sent out tools,” he said. 

Providing a product to influencers in exchange for a video review is now a fairly common practice in today’s e-commerce landscape. Roberts also said that some influencers discovered and reviewed the tool on their own, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. After the social media success, LogOX exploded in popularity. 

By the end of 2017, the family knew they had a legitimate business. “We bootstrapped the whole thing with our own savings. In 2017, it was starting to gain a lot of traction on Amazon” Roberts said. Today, LogOX is sold in 30 different retailers in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and the company is working on getting into retailers in Japan. 

In addition to selling directly to consumers, LogOX markets to tree care businesses. “A lot of people age out of tree care work around their early to mid-thirties. It’s like being a professional athlete in the sense that you can only do it for so long because it’s so high impact on your body. So, it’s imperative to keep your workforce healthy. Our product makes this kind of work faster, safer, and easier,” Roberts said about working with the forestry industry.

“In a published university study, the LogOX Hauler was scientifically proven to reduce strain by up to 93 percent on the back, up to 89 percent on the quadriceps, and up to 76 percent on the biceps, when lifting and moving log rounds, compared to lifting them by hand,” said Roberts proudly.* “The LogOX 3-in-1 Forestry MultiTool and WoodOX Sling Firewood Carrier are both also listed in the Purdue University-based National AgrAbility Project’s Assistive Technology Database, which vets products for use by farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural workers with disabilities.”

When asked what the biggest issue LogOX has had to deal with, Roberts said, “The massive increase in steel prices and cost of energy over the past year has impacted our manufacturing costs in the US.” As a result, LogOX had to raise its prices for the first time in 2022. In the lead-up to this increase, LogOX made five improvements to its original design, which helped justify the price. People who own a previous model can also purchase an upgrade package from LogOX, to gain most of the new features. 

LogOX’s trademarked tagline is From Harvest to Hearth and for good reason, as Austin pointed out, “After harvesting it with the MultiTool, people can carry their firewood indoors with their ergonomic WoodOX Sling and then conveniently stage their firewood in a Hearth Bin.” The latter product is an adjustable firewood rack that Jon invented because he couldn’t find one on the market that would fit onto his narrow hearth.

When asked what’s next for LogOX, Austin Roberts said, “The industries we service, from tree care to home firewood heating, have a ton of potential. With the rising cost of home heating fuel, cordwood is a roughly 40 to 60 percent less expensive alternative energy source, so more people are considering it.  Already about 2 million households, in the US alone, use firewood as a primary heat source, but it’s a relatively underserved market. For instance, the cant hook design was around for 160 years, but no one ever really improved on its design, until we came around. Most of the other products on the market had been sort of taken for granted—that’s just what you use. You use your hands to load a splitter, or you use a bag to carry the firewood, simply because you always have. So, we just came up with better ways of doing it.”

For more information about LogOX, check out their BBB Business Profile. To learn more about BBB and read more stories like this, visit Behind the Business Stories.

*The study was published in the October 2019 “Journal of Innovative Ideas in Engineering and Technology (JIIET)”, conducted by the Fairfield University School of Engineering.

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