Home Furniture
Misuraemme, based in Como, Italy, designs and produces top end, designer home environments and its superior quality product range includes wooden chairs, tables, cupboards, shelving and decorative items. This major, family-owned company’s products regularly appear in magazines such as Elle Décor, Marie Clair Maison and Casa D, and for the segment of the market they appeal to, require a very high quality finish. Misuraemme has been a customer of Becker Acroma for over a decade.
We previously helped our customer procure finishing equipment from Giardina, including IR lamps, MOS microwave oven and UV lamps for drying. Misuraemme then asked us if we could come up with a solution that would achieve four things; maintain the quality of its products, speed up production, decrease drying times and reduce the impact of the company’s activities on the environment. We would also be competing against four suppliers for the business. A tall order maybe, but one that we relish as the solutions partner.
We were informed that we had won the contract as we had achieved an excellent finish on Misuraemme’s products with our water-based UV products and started supplying the solution to the customer.
From solvents to water
Misuraemme had been using pigmented polyurethane products, but at 60 minutes, the drying time was too long and this resulted in colour changes having to be made during the finishing process. This was proving time-consuming and expensive. With the aim of cutting drying times and thereby optimizing production, we formed a development team consisting of our own finishing experts, a team from Misuraemme people and a team from the Giardina, the finishing equipment maker.
By working together with this closely-knit team, containing all the required skills and expertise for the project, we studied various waterborne solutions on different surfaces and tested them on Giardina’s finishing equipment in an off-site, full-scale production environment. The benefits of this were two-fold for the customer; it was able to continue with its normal production and the project team could allocate the necessary time and resources towards researching and then producing a solution to the customer’s problem. The solution we came up with is a range of water-based, pigmented UV curing products that enhance the high-quality finish of Misuraemme’s products.
The results are in
With our solution Misuraemme cut the drying time from 60 minutes to 11 minutes, saving thousands of hours of work time and avoiding unnecessary colour changes. This alone saves the company a huge amount of resources and throughput times have increased dramatically. Although our customer’s production level remains the same at around 500 square metres per day, it uses 15% less paint.
From an environmental point of view too our customer has dramatically reduced the impact of its activities on the environment, cutting its solvents emission level by 24,000 kg. Becker Acroma in Italy continues to work hand-in-hand with this important customer and is its major supplier of water-based solutions.