THETA Furniture & More will open new offices in Belgium and France and will start operations on a new plant in Romania this year. Florin Gheorghe, the company’s Managing Director, outlines the main business plans and the strategy to reach a turnover of EUR 14 million turnover by the end of 2022.
How would you describe 2021 from the perspective of your company? What were the main objectives you achieved last year?
For most of us, 2021 was a balancing act between hope and adjustment, with rational reactions to still challenging circumstances in the overall pandemic context. Despite all the challenges that have arisen, 2021 has been the best year in the history of THETA Furniture & More so far, we have ended the year with a turnover of just over EUR 10 million and we have achieved our goals set at the beginning of the year.
Moreover, during the year we identified new prospects and opportunities for growth and development. Our accomplishments include:
- The construction of the new custom-made furniture production factory with a surface of 5,000 sqm, located in Păulești, Prahova County – at the end of the year the construction had a completion rate of 90%.
- Strengthening THETA team – one of the ingredients of the year-end results was effective teamwork.
- Consolidation of the position of professionals with unique customized solutions in the interior design & fit-out industry, being anchored in the current context, present and relevant to the industry (local & international).
- First steps for opening international working points in Brussels (Belgium) and Paris (France).
- Carrying out turnkey and complex projects, for clients from all market segments (office, medical, commercial, HoReCa).
Which are your main goals in 2022? (business, culture, company, market, etc.)
Most business people who manage their own business or others prefer to feel in control, which makes them feel secure. Calibrating expectations and accepting that variety is the norm helps us embrace lack of control to the extent that we can find ways to enforce a certain level of clarity both for ourselves and in relation with partners, clients, colleagues. The importance of upbringing an openness to new possibilities, as well as other lessons learned in 2021, are valuable to us and we have taken them into account in setting our business goals for 2022. This year’s goals include:
- Completion of the construction of the new custom-made furniture manufacturing plant by the end of February 2022. The new factory will replace the current one, located nearby, and we are preparing to start operations from March-April 2022; currently we have started the process of transferring the machinery, materials and all the necessary from the current factory to the new one.
- Achieving a turnover of EUR 14 million.
- Opening foreign offices in Brussels and Paris. The first one will be in Brussels and will have the same activity as the main office in Bucharest: interior design & fit-out services for various spaces, with focus on custom-made furniture solutions, as we have already identified niches with needs that we can successfully cover. The Belgian market is not new for us as we have fitted out in the past years locations such as: senior homes, student hostels, a 3,000 sqm hospital, also moving ahead with the signing of an important contract, at the end of last year, for a complex project – the Grand Hôpital De Charleroi hospital (20,000 sqm), for which we will deliver entirely custom-made furniture in the next two years.
- We are also developing new special divisions, focused on: flooring solutions and projects in the medical segment, sustained by dedicated teams of professionals.
- Maintaining and continuously improving our status as professionals with unique custom solutions in the interior design & fit-out industry.
Our company culture is the personality of this company and certainly influences how we make decisions and how we interact with other businesses and the general public. Therefore, a company’s mission, values, ethics and environment all play important roles in its culture. Our mission – our ambition remains the same as last year, aligned with the business directions outlined: to leave our mark on the customer experience, as a renowned general interior contractor, through unique & innovative solutions and perseverance.
What trends will shape the market in 2022 from your perspective?
One of the greatest adaptation skills we had to develop over the past year was “playing” with our imaginations – how our minds can lead us beyond the limitations we currently live in.
For millennia, interior design trends have been used as aesthetic aids in our attempts to find some kind of inner peace, they have also always been in tune with social changes and trends, nowadays the human need is predominantly to feel safe wherever we are.
The design trends from the point remain the same as last year: trying to bring nature closer and closer to contemporary man, through natural colours and eco-friendly materials. The social aspect of office life will be made possible by designing open spaces with minimal optical separation and integrating as many attractive common areas as possible with multiple functions.
Digitalization of most businesses will soon become a ‘must’, in fact, any business that promotes digitalization in a particular industry has gained momentum in this period. Design experts predict that more companies will adopt what is known as “hotelisation”. This means that employees no longer have assigned seats, but instead locate where there is space available for the type of tasks they are working on.
In the office segment, which has been hit the hardest, when returning to the office, employees expect much more than just an office – but a destination, an exceptional experience that offers more than their home office could provide. Developers and landlords have been working on special concepts since last year to identify the best ways to provide tenants with conditions that provide employees with safety and tools to use technology to enhance, not replace, human interactions.
As 2021 showed us, we foresee the prolonging of the raw materials and finished products’ crisis, that will negatively reflect on business plan predictability and can further generate reduced stocks and delayed orders from suppliers. Of course, at the same time, we will all identify new solutions so that there is still a balance and potential for growth and betterment.