Josh in 1992, ready for a helicopter ride with his uncle.
When Josh Dill was 9 years old, he donned a green baseball cap with an image of a helicopter and the Weyerhaeuser logo. Then he boarded a Weyerhaeuser helicopter with his uncle Tom Dill, a company aviation mechanic, for an aerial sightseeing tour of Seattle.
Back then, Josh didn’t know what he wanted to do when he grew up — but his uncle Tom wasn’t the only Weyerhaeuser employee he knew.
“I moved up to Seattle during high school, but I grew up in Myrtle Point, a logging community on the southern Oregon coast, so many of my neighbors worked for the timber industry,” Josh says. “I have childhood friends who do contract work for our Western Timberlands today — building logging roads, hauling logs or harvesting.”
Josh’s uncle, Tom Dill, worked in Weyerhaeuser aviation for 30 years and retired with the company.
Josh, digital marketing manager for Wood Products at our Seattle Headquarters, has now been working for Weyerhaeuser for nine years.
“I enjoy working in an industry that supports the small town where I grew up and rural communities like it across the U.S. and Canada,” he says. “Companies like ours can be such a lifeblood for rural areas, and I'm proud that so much of what we do supports and happens in rural communities.”
(L-R): Neal Shunk, VP Sales & Marketing and Supply Chain; Josh; and Wendy Minichiello, Sales Director – EWP, when Josh received an Excellence in Innovation Award last March. 'It recognized my work on our specification center. It's an section of our website where a user can pull up a map of the U.S. and Canada and locate their region and who their rep is, and also regional-specific information. We also made an effort this year to move away from having stacks of printed material on our tables at trade shows to having QR codes so people can pull up documents.'
MEET JOSH
Your title is digital marketing manager. Tell us what you do.
I manage online and digital content for our Wood Products business, which covers four business segments: Engineered Wood, OSB and Panels, Distribution and Lumber. If you look on Weyerhaeuser.com, everything under Wood Products is in my wheelhouse. Additionally, I run our online advertising, Document Library mobile app, email marketing, Google business location listings and our Wood Products-focused social media.
What’s your favorite part of the job?
A couple of things: The creativity and the customer engagement. One part of my job is creating marketing videos, so I go out in the field to interview customers like builders and dealers, and we film in our mills or at job sites. It's always interesting, from a marketing perspective, because we know our own marketing language about why our products are great, and we promote that language to our target audiences. But it’s really cool when I talk to a customer and they use that same language organically because it describes their actual experience with our products. That’s very rewarding.
Josh and his daughter Olivia, age 7, with the Mariners Moose at a home game in Seattle.
You must have some challenges. What are they?
We market to a broad but specific audience. For example, there could be one person purchasing our products — the builder — but other professionals are involved and influence which products are used. We have to adjust the way we communicate to each audience because the message to architects and engineers is different from the message to builders and dealers.
What are some of the places you've been able to travel to for work?
I’ve been able to travel all over. It’s always interesting, because so many of our locations are in rural, remote areas that you might never visit otherwise. But those small areas are charming and unique. I really liked the western part of Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley area.
Josh studied abroad in college in Seoul, South Korea, and even played on the school football team. 'I didn't have a growth spurt until the end of my junior year of high school, so I was like 5 feet tall in high school. I finally got to play football on the university team!'
Are there any recent projects that you’re especially proud of?
I realized at one point during the pandemic that we didn't have an overview video of our wood products. We have one-off videos about specific products and interviews with somebody who uses them, which are great, but I really wanted something that covered more. I scripted out, edited and narrated this quick, two-minute rapid succession video that covers our engineered wood products, OSB, Distribution and our ForteWEB software. We’ve been able to use it at tradeshows, and several of our EWP territory managers have used it in their presentations to customers. With any video, my goal is to create something that helps others do their jobs and gives them something to use when they're selling to customers.
Tell us something about yourself that might surprise people.
I studied Korean language and history for a couple years at the University of Washington and continued those subjects when I studied abroad for six months in Seoul, South Korea. I still speak it a bit, which came in handy at the International Builders Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, this past February. A few visitors to our booth were from Korea, so I spoke to them in Korean. My colleagues were shocked!
A photo from one of Josh’s adventure rides. Each year he goes on a week-long off-road motorcycle trip with three to five friends, three of whom he’s known since high school.
What do you like about your team?
It’s small, and everyone is extremely kind and always looking out for each other, both professionally and personally. We do a good job of recognizing each other and what we're working on and accomplishing. And there's a lot of support anytime someone needs additional help or direction.
Josh has been practicing martial arts since 2004. He studied with Taky Kimura (in photos), who was Bruce Lee’s best friend and ran Bruce’s martial arts school when Bruce left Seattle and continued to run it until he passed away in 2021. Recently, Josh has started getting into jiujitsu.
Tell us about your other interests. What do you like to do when you’re not at work?
Number one, I love spending time with my daughter. She's my favorite person to take to Mariners games. We enjoy home movie nights where we turn off all the lights to watch movies and we make popcorn — she likes to mix a bunch of candy in the popcorn! She recently started quarter-midget racing, which has been a blast. If you’ve never heard of it, I’d encourage you to look it up.
I volunteer about 15 to 20 hours a month on my church’s production team, operating video cameras. It’s an extra way to build my knowledge and skillset for creating videos at work while also supporting my church community.
I also enjoy adventure riding motorcycles. My bike is made for on- and off-road, and every year for the past decade my friends and I take a big adventure ride. We load all our gear on our bikes: tents, food, everything. Then we head up in the mountains on logging roads, ATV trails, Forest Service roads connecting to a web of off-road routes. We've taken week-long rides through Idaho, Washington, Oregon and a bit of Montana.
Josh volunteering to film events at his church.
