Company name, turnover, number of employees:

Name: Raw Studios CC
Turnover: R2 000 000 p/a and growing.
No of employees: 6

Business field and market area (global, domestic):

Raw Studios is, in essence, a product design company specializing in furniture and large scale wood installations. We work with architects, interior designers and a array of other companies, managing small to large scale projects. Over and above creating design solution for other companies, we have just launched our own product range of modular storage solutions to great critical acclaim. The domestic market is our focus at the moment, but we are investigating the possibility  exporting our products to other markets, mainly Europe. 

Your main products and customer segments: 

Our main products are modular storage solutions for public and private consumption. Our furniture range would look just as good in the home as they would in high-end office application. For other businesses we design all types of furniture, from whole office systems to once off pieces such as boardroom tables.

Which Koskisen products and services you use and how those have improved your business? 

Raw Studios mainly imports Koskisen birch plywood products. Mostly with standard plywood but also Koskidecor,  Koskidecor Eco and KoskiGluelam which we use for all the solid wood components in our products. We had, before we started importing form Koskisen, worked with the plywood we could source locally but the quality was poor and inconsistent and limited to Pine and Okume. Since we started working with the high quality Koskisen products our own level of quality and excellence has risen dramatically. We used to have to worry about voids within the layers of plywood, warping and sanding through the top veneers, now we hardly think about it any more. Koskisen quality is consistent, but as important as quality is the service we have received from Koskisen. Dealing with Koskisen, we feel as though we are dealing with a small family business, even though we realize that its a huge company, they are flexible and they listen to the smaller operators as much as they do to the big players. This flexibility is of utmost importance to Raw Studios. To illustrate this I would like to tell a story about customer care. 

Raw Studios received a contract from a local Coffee Company to produce a few hundred point-of-sale cabinets and we wanted to use the company colours for the units. We made some samples of the colour that we needed and sent them off to Finland. Just over a week later we received several samples back (not bad for a company 10000 km away) and we could present them to the client for approval. The level of service rendered by Marcel van Doesburg, our koskisen representative, was really amazing.

More information on the company at www.rawstudios.co.za