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Home > ÖSTERREICH > Akzente
THE BIRTH OF COLLECTIVE FURNISHINGS IN VERONA
Rome (Ign) - An association of companies that unites product and process innovation and aims at relaunching a district with a hundred years of business activity, not to mention history, culture and traditions dating back as far as the Renaissance. And which has decided to face the challenges of the furnishings market of the future. This is "Biosfera", a project and at the same time a brand promoted by Verona's Trade Fair, Chambers of Commerce and the Banca Popolare di Verona. To fight the crisis,14 craftsmen and an equal number of architects have joined forces to set up a "virtual supply chain" in which their tasks are perfectly shared out with particular attention to division and product specialisation. Within this system, there are those who prepare semifinished goods using numerically controlled machinery, those who polish inlay work and those who assemble the finished product. In this way, the traditional approach is overturned: the starting point is no longer the needs of production but those of the customers, meaning no more warehouses full of unsold goods, due to companies failing to adopt modern methods of order portfolio management. The result is a system which rationally shortens the supply chain, which in turn becomes flexible to the point of providing tailor-made products.
Particular attention is given to product innovation, seeing that specialisation also involves design: the furniture is produced using craftsmanship of the highest level and embodies the taste of rediscovered modern rationalism. The design used, for example, in the creation of six product lines, combines elements of bio-construction with attention to eco-friendly building. Use is also made of the latest methods of labour cycle tracking, in the sense that it is always possible to know who made a certain piece of furniture and how. Great importance is also given to low environmental impact, while not forgetting attention to quality, above all in terms of natural materials and finishes. The result is furniture built as a team in a highly specialised ideal factory, ready to compete from the point of view of quality on all the global markets: in only nine months 74 prototypes have been designed and put into production, now ready for the distribution chains and to be sold to order.
Biosfera is a real revolution in the heart of a district which previously concentrated entirely on the German market, which used to absorb the majority of its turnover. In the area known as "Bassa veronese", near Padova and Rovigo, there are 3,386 furniture producers in 48 council districts, with an export quota of €232m. The medium-large companies can be counted on the fingers of one hand, while the rest are craft workshops, sometimes very small, and family-run cottage industries housed in small sheds. This spontaneous activism, however, is highly seasonal and has no power to dictate prices, because nobody has the strength to be set up a commercial office. This is why it is necessary for the craftsman and the carpenter to join forces with the architect and the designer, in a project historically linked to the idea of "traditional style", in search of a more enterprising, dynamic and above all cosmopolitan image. In order to avoid excessive fragmentation of the production cycle, supply surplus and too many links in the distribution chain, the "virtual company" - in which each business maintains its own specificity while working to a common production design - combines the recovery of traditional (and typical) techniques of the Veneto region and the area around Verona with modern work and marketing organisation. An example well worth imitating.
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