From the Crane Group to a buyer in Scranton.

TimberTech is a North American brand of outdoor decking, railing and porch products, and since 1 July 2025 it has belonged to James Hardie Industries plc, the fibre cement company with roots in Australia. Before that it was the decking name of The AZEK Company of Chicago, and before that it belonged to a family business in Ohio. Each change of owner has left a mark on how the name is used, and the clearest way to read the brand is to follow those owners in order.

The earliest owner the documents name is the Crane Group. A release issued by CPG International Inc. in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on 27 August 2012 describes TimberTech as “a subsidiary of the Crane Group” and as a maker of decking, railing and accessory products. The same release describes the Crane Group as a family-owned, privately held company based in Columbus, Ohio, founded by Robert S. Crane Sr. in 1947, with interests that ran from private equity and real estate to a network of operating companies.

The release was announcing a sale. CPG International said it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire TimberTech and expected to complete the deal in late September 2012. CPG was then the parent company of AZEK Building Products, whose own lines included decking, railing, porch boards, trim, mouldings and pavers, and its brand list in the same document ran from AZEK Trim and Moulding, AZEK Deck and AZEK Rail to names such as Santana Products, Comtec Industries and Capitol.

The people quoted in the release explain the logic in their own words. Eric K. Jungbluth, chief executive of CPG, said that “the ultimate goal is for our AZEK business and TimberTech to join forces”, and called the deal “a merger of equals”. Tanny Crane, president of the Crane Group, called it “a difficult decision for our company and our family”. Mike Crane, president of The Crane Group Companies, said the family felt it was keeping TimberTech “in the family”, because the Crane Group had once held a majority interest in CPG itself. So the sale of 2012 joined two businesses that already shared part of their history.

Two names, one umbrella, then a new parent.

For several years after the 2012 deal the combined business sold decking under two names. A release from AZEK Building Products, dated Chicago, 4 February 2019, says plainly that “traditionally, the company went to market under both the AZEK and TimberTech brand names”. By then the parent was called The AZEK Company, and the release describes it as being in the midst of rethinking its brand under new leadership.

That release set out the new arrangement. TimberTech would become the umbrella brand for all decking, railing, porch, paver, fastening and lighting products, while the trim and moulding business moved under a newly named AZEK Exteriors. The AZEK name did not disappear from decking: it became part of a product name inside the TimberTech family. The release lists the decking portfolio as TimberTech AZEK, TimberTech PRO and TimberTech EDGE, describing the AZEK line as capped polymer boards, the PRO line as four-sided capped composite and the EDGE line as a new series of three-sided capped composite boards. Jesse Singh, chief executive of The AZEK Company, said EDGE had been launched “specifically for the cost-conscious consumer”.

The 2019 release also names a contractor scheme, the TimberTech Loyal Rewards Program, and says the company was adding limited warranty benefits on certain product systems for contractors enrolled in it. It describes the parent as headquartered in Chicago, with plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and as the owner of the Minneapolis-based Ultralox railing business.

The next change came from outside the United States. On 1 July 2025, in a release dated Sydney and Chicago, James Hardie announced that it had completed its acquisition of The AZEK Company, and that AZEK stock had ceased trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The release lists James Hardie’s brands after the deal as Hardie, TimberTech, AZEK Exteriors, Versatex, StruXure, Ultralox and Intex, and names Jon Skelly as President – AZEK Residential and Sam Toole as chief marketing officer for the AZEK brands. TimberTech’s own website now presents AZEK Exteriors and StruXure as members of “our family of brands”.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group make the outside of a house: the shingles and membranes on its roof, the boards and panels on its walls and the decking and railings around it. Roofing, siding and decking names sit at many different points in the building trade, from businesses that grew out of a single product or family firm to names that now belong to much larger groups selling a whole range of exterior materials.

Most homeowners meet these brands only a few times, and often through someone else: a contractor, a dealer, a sample board or a colour card. A brand’s identity is therefore carried less by a single product than by its name, its product families, its colour ranges and the programmes it runs for the people who install its materials. Ownership can change several times while the name on the bundle stays the same.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its names and product lines have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A brand built around a reorganisation.

The most useful thing TimberTech offers a designer is a clear record of how a brand architecture was rearranged in public. Before February 2019 the parent sold decking under two names that had arrived from two different companies. After it, one of those names, TimberTech, became the master brand for everything outdoors and underfoot, while the other, AZEK, was split two ways: it became the name of a premium decking line inside TimberTech, as TimberTech AZEK, and the root of a separate trim brand, AZEK Exteriors. The 2019 release spells this out line by line.

The product names that sit under the umbrella follow a simple pattern: the master brand first, then a short qualifier. TimberTech AZEK, TimberTech PRO and TimberTech EDGE each pair the brand with one word, and the release ties each to a type of board rather than to a colour or a mood. The same release names the Vintage Collection inside the TimberTech AZEK line and describes it adding multi-width decking, with wide, standard and narrow planks.

Advertising played a visible part in the change. The February 2019 release says the rebrand began with a television commercial shown during the professional football championship the night before, describing it as the first in a series of ads that showed the TimberTech product lines “in imaginative and surprising ways”. The campaign line, quoted from Jesse Singh, was “Go Against the Grain”. The release says the full portfolio would be shown at the NAHB International Builders’ Show in Las Vegas later that month, and that Jeanine Gaffke, chief marketing officer of The AZEK Company, was launching a new TimberTech.com at the same time.

Ownership has since added another layer. Under James Hardie, the 2025 release presents TimberTech as one of several exterior names under a single parent, alongside the Hardie siding brand, rather than as the lead name of a separate listed company.

For a design guide, TimberTech shows how a decking name from a family-owned Ohio group became the umbrella for a much larger portfolio, and how a rival name was folded inside it as a product line. Compare it with AZEK, the name it now carries as a decking line, and Trex, another composite decking brand. For this guide we use deck brown, weathered sage and cedar amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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