While working at a large furniture company, I noticed that the production chain has become longer and more complex by maintaining the same principles instead of innovating. If we look at the raw materials’ processing and take leather as an example, then € 1 material costs quickly amount to € 1.48 due to the storage costs. Cutting the leather to size results in a material loss of 35%, and cutting those remains and sewing them together caused absenteeism. The joints’ heavy strain from cutting and stitching became more and more intense as the leather thickened. As a result, employees had to pull harder and harder to tighten the furniture shapes. Around 2000, due to the economic boom, people were not available for production in Europe. By only moving labor to where the workforce was present and not the knowledge, you saw that the production chains only got longer, the losses increased, the quality declined, and the expertise decreased.

This made it clear to me that the expertise should not be maintained or increased, but that the production process had to be tackled. How can we make the product differently? In 2001 the idea arose to coat the leather instead of upholstering it. This inspiration came during the coating of furniture with solvent-based flexible coatings. In the following years, I started to process skins to be able to apply them as a coating completely. In 2012 we began developing coatings from local waste streams. A local leather tanner had a leather waste stream that generally went into the incinerator. We still convert this leather waste stream into our CoolLeather coating. In addition to leather, I also started working with concrete, and we started applying these waste materials to foam. By producing the entire piece of furniture from foam, we have drastically shortened the production chain. For this, we have developed new production techniques in-house, obtaining the suitable fineness, the way of application, sanding, application, quality development, and all this in the most sustainable way possible. We test our coatings using certified testing techniques.

Cooloo’s ecological coatings and the production techniques developed by us fit perfectly in our Endless Life principle. I am convinced that we can give furniture an Endless Life by coating it and keeping production chains as short as possible. As a result, we produce our furniture as sustainably as possible, and it can be recycled or refurbished locally. Coating is the new upholstering!