Furniture Clustering and networking

• The international market outlook studies indicate that wooden household furniture fashions will remain volatile: what is “in” this year may vanish the next year. The basic problem is that while investments should be planned long-term, furniture markets and fashions live on a faster lane. New collections will have to be created at shorter intervals in order to keep pace with the market’s tastes. This essentially calls for the flexibility of production, which can be best achieved through networking among firms.

• The world’s wooden furniture manufacturing can demonstrate many types of successful networks and clusters. Most of the eminent exporter countries to the international markets have undergone an evolution of their own in organizing a competitive national furniture-manufacturing base (e.g. Italy, Germany, Denmark, Brazil, Malaysia, etc.).

• Approaches and practical industrial development patterns are varied, and simply mimicking an existing structure in another place is not enough. This is why some industry restructuring and relocation into furniture zones and “imposed clusters” have not borne fruit. Organic growth and subtle political support mechanisms appear to have enabled some of the leading clusters to become sustainable and truly beneficial to the industry as a whole. A dynamic industry is always required to inhabit such clusters.

• Furniture clusters have found widespread acceptance in almost every major furniture exporting country. Nevertheless, there is a lot of differentiation in their basic philosophy to suit local conditions.

• Inevitably, the success of these four cluster models also varies and illustrates their contribution towards the sustainable growth of the furniture industries as a whole.
• It has not become fully clear how the Pakistani firms are networking between them. In other countries like Egypt, the local furniture showroom owners hold a strong negotiating power over the smaller furniture workshops. Showroom owners sub-contract these artisans to manufacture components or un-finished furniture on copied designs, and then cream up the profits by assembling, fabricating, finishing and marketing the ready furniture.