This approach has enabled Schattdecor to come up with many successful decors over the years, pinpointing the fact that work done by its design team today is aimed at guaranteeing its success tomorrow.Photogravure printing machines quickly provide the company’s customers with accurate samples of design ideas, while high-speed printing machines ensure the necessary capacity for all printing orders. Grey, black and, in particular, white are the colour trends for surfaces this year. Both wood and stone decors have a new restrained look, providing the ideal background for strong, colourful special effects. Typical combinations include, for example, a classic, pearly grey decor with a richly colourful wood full of character, such as walnut. Or white wood combined with dark stone looks – this season’s offering for a classic black and white theme.Grey also features in all sorts of varieties this year, such as peal grey, mouse grey, light grey and anthracite grey; the elegant, purist line being very much the trend. However, the trend is also for intense high-gloss mono-colours. With white figuring most prominently in this season’s trends, Schattdecor emphasised the point most emphatically between February 25 and 28 at the annual premier ZOW furniture components trade fair in Bad Salzuflen, Germany, by welcoming clients to its pure white booth where over 55 decors were on display. During the show some 300 clients visited the stand, which depicted a contiguous communication concept giving the 180m2 area the form of a loft apartment. New decors on display were Sylvenstein Maple and Salisbury Oak in a Smartfoil version. The company said that the stone reproduction Nero Marquina in particular enabled this Thansau decor specialist to demonstrate its flair for trend-inspired decors.
Before the show, Schattdecor’s creative executives said they wondered how customers, and the trade audience in general, would respond to the unconventional presentation concept. The trade show team, headed by chief sales executive Hartwig Dickten, design manager Claudia Küchen and corporate communications director Bernd Reuss was expecting a favourable reception, but they say they were pleasantly surprised at the overwhelmingly positive response. "By adopting an interactive form of decor presentation, we trod paths in product communication we have never taken before. In the process, we made use of schematic white furniture which revealed decors when certain elements were turned or pushed," said Mr Reuss. "This enabled us not only to present more decors altogether but also to purposefully draw attention to specific ones."
By giving the booth the form of a loft apartment in pure white, Claudia Küchen and her design team achieved the feat of showing not just one but several highly contemporary trend themes. At the same time, the trend colour white proved to be the ideal backdrop for presenting the decors and showing how well they go with solid colours in modern furniture design. The unusual approach of exhibiting the decors on schematic furniture, much in the way that they are used on the real thing, also enabled the decor developers to display them in horizontal formats – as on broad drawers – to best effect. The new departure of giving the booth the form of a loft apartment also allowed the interdisciplinary design team to showcase decor solutions for the merging of living areas – a trend increasingly being seen in modern residential interiors.
For chief sales executive Hartwig Dicten, the showing was thus a highly successful one, particularly as the decors and trend themes so obviously captured the pulse of the times. "The heartwood and sapwood theme launched by Schattdecor with Valais Plum found more refined expression in the form of Stromberg and Sylvenstein Maple. However, we are already thinking further. Marmara Maple, for example, is a perfect reflection of the new brown-grey trend – as the demand proved," said Mr Dicten. The trade audience was also shown Salisbury Oak Grey, a decor in Schattdecor’s Smartfoil Real collection which displays the tactile authenticity of genuine wood veneer – a triumph of reprographic technology, says the company. Over 80% of visitors to the Schattdecor booth stemmed from central European markets, thus underscoring the significance ZOW holds for the decor paper printer. Foreign visitor participation at ZOW overtook German companies and foreign companies now make up 51% of exhibitors, compared to 49% in 2007. There were 16,500 trade visitors, according to event organiser Survey GmbH, and total exhibition area was 45,000m2, up from 41,000m2 a year ago.
In view of this boost to its visitor figures, it was inevitable that Schattdecor registered better trade show results than in 2006 – the last time it participated in ZOW. The results also confirm the success of the strategy adopted by Schattdecor for German trade shows, says Bernd Reuss, involving as it does sole concentration on Interzum in the years in which the biennial event takes place, while participating at ZOW in the alternate years. The unconventional booth concept also enabled the company to underscore the claim that its core competencies lie in the fields of decor development and printing. "In future there will be a greater call for decor diversity rather than narrow choices. What would modern furniture or flooring be like without such variety? Decor development is one of our strengths, alongside printing, and this is something we want to emphasise more strongly in the future," said Reiner Schulz, Schattdecor’s chief executive officer. Schattdecor generates 50% of its business abroad, thus helping to safeguard the chief location in Thansau, which performs many services and coordination functions for the whole group. The company provides customers with finish foil products in the form of pre-impregnated decor paper and post-impregnated and thin foil in line with individual requirements. In 2007, over 100 million m2 of finish foil were produced. Lacquering is carried out in an off-line process for optimum quality results and can be performed at widths totalling 275cm. Schattdecor offers over 1,000 decors for residential applications.
The company also decided in 2007 to set up a Foil Innovation Centre at the parent plant in Thansau to expand its position in the foil market. The centre began operation in January, complete with a foil R&D pilot line designed and produced by Rotodecor, Schattdecor’s machine engineering arm. Schattdecor’s foil specialists have been at work developing foil products with enhanced characteristics ever since. A further service allows customers to colour-match all desired decors in every foil quality and depart with the resulting laboratory reel under their arm. In mid-2007, the Schattdecor foil plant in Glucholazy, Poland started up a new Rotodecor foil line which can provide decors with all lacquer finishes from standard to R4 and even further, in widths up to 275cm. Along with the other high-performance lacquering line already in place in Glucholazy, the new unit represents a significant capacity increase in Smartfoil made by Schattdecor.
This family-managed, mid-sized company says it is a good example of how expansion abroad creates jobs at home; motivated and qualified employees are said to be one of the reasons for the company’s swift success.
