Focusing on our Ultimate Customers

(April 8, 2009)

I’m less than 24 hours home from this year’s European Decor Surfaces Conference & Workshop in Barcelona, and despite the jet lag I feel pretty good.

One of the things I feel good about is the name of the conference itself. It was the “European Laminates Conference,” founded originally to focus on paper-based decorative surfaces, like HPL, TFM and printed paper foils. This year the presentations included 3-D laminates, ending a segregation that I always found unnecessary.

The reasons for this were obvious enough. Over the years most of these conferences were driven by suppliers; in the case of the decorative laminates world, the decorative and base paper suppliers were the sponsors and benefactors of these conferences. Because of the nature of these companies, and the fact that the laminates divisions were often a tiny part of these large global concerns, the presentations tended to focus on highly technical subjects and on commodity market issues.

The emphasis was always on increasing manufacturing efficiencies and addressing the needs and concerns of the immediate customer – the saturator, the printer, the laminates producer, etc. This “supply-side” bias created a downstream disconnect in the value chain that literally became a dead end – one, two or even three steps shy of the industry’s ultimate users, the consumer and the design specifier.

I began attending many of these conferences as early as 1995, and I couldn’t help but note that they were a bit more academic than “real world.” As a journalist my experience was mainly in interviewing designers and architects, who aren’t shy about telling you what they like and don’t like about materials, and what kinds of solutions they are still seeking for their projects. As a result I’ve become fairly familiar with how they think, how they go about specifying materials from other industries, and most importantly, how they like to receive information on materials that are new to them.

The disturbing bottom line is, as upstream suppliers are killing themselves to shave 2% off of production costs, designers are willing to pay significantly higher prices for a product that’s engineered to their needs and tastes.

Put even more simply: while millions of dollars are going into research and technology to help companies to increase profits my a miniscule amount,  a simple understanding of the design market could lead to margin factors of two or three times what they are now.

This works for other product categories; why not ours?

It’s because we haven’t bothered, as an industry, to develop our “product story” to this level of buyer. But I think I’m seeing light at the end of this tunnel. Efforts like the Surfaces and Design section here in Panels and Furniture Asia, Material Innovations in Interiors & Sources, and Surfacing Solutions in Wood Digest, (all content supplied by Material Intelligence (.com)), are forcing suppliers to look all the way downstream, which gives them a fresh perspective when they turn their heads back up the supply chain.

This connection needs to become a busy two-way street, sharing ideas for where to use our existing products with those specifiers, and ideas for where our products should and could be used filtering up toward those producers who wouldn’t otherwise make that connection.

This is not only the way for our industry to survive the current crisis, it’s a golden opportunity to gain market share against other materials as specifers search for better value, performance and design consistency. We can no longer congratulate ourselves for minor increases in efficiency while we ignore major opportunities in more effectively reaching the ultimate users of our products.

Working together throughout the entire value chain to tell that story is an excellent first step.

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