Designs of the future

The Egger Group is the successful and proud producer of a myriad of wood based panel products with a total of 17 plants in seven countries with more than 9,000 employees.

It was founded in 1961 in Tyrol, Austria where Fritz Egger Snr opened his first particleboard plant. Its headquarters are retained here.

Egger is a full-range supplier for the furniture industry and interior design, wood construction and laminate flooring sectors.

The company has a wide range of products which are constantly developing.

Besides the regular development of new on-trend décors and surfaces, there is an emphasis on driving forward technological innovations in order to consistently improve products, simplify working processes and for long-term growth.

The company’s range of worktops has been developed to co-ordinate with the latest colour tones in kitchen design. Egger is in the fortunate position to do this because it produces the worktop as well as the materials that are used in other areas of the kitchen, such as doors and end panels, giving the resources to achieve a co-ordinated look. How the worktop combines with other elements, such as doors and shelving, is crucial to giving the customer the choice to mix and match.

Many worktop designs have matching melamine-faced particleboard to create a co-ordinated kitchen design for end panels, door frontals or shelving.

Egger’s successful trade collection, Zoom, which gave planners and fabricators countless décor options, has now been replaced with the Decorative Collection 2017-2019, bringing together the company’s complete offering into one range.

Egger’s 9-Grid is an orientation system that allows a fast, direct comparison between colours and shades as well as clustering woodgrains and materials according to their character. This enables the ideal décors to be specified for a project.

All 300 décors in the collection are arranged into nine grids and to provide a clear orientation they are clustered into nine décor groups. In this way Egger makes developing creative ideas easier.

The company also offers a wide selection of floors for architects, installers and interior designers as well as do-it-yourselfers. Be it down-to-earth, extravagant, classic, modern, vintage or country house style, the wide range of décors and the specially developed surfaces are said to offer the perfect solution for every space.

The Egger Group, steered by brothers Michael and Fritz Egger, has its business operations led by Walter Schiegl (production/technology), Ulrich Bühler (sales/marketing) and Thomas Leissing (finance/administration/logistics).

“Egger acquired its reputation as an innovative, dynamic company over the course of decades,” said Ulrich Bühler. “This begins with our basic materials and extends to the development of innovative materials and to trendsetting décors and surfaces. We develop more than just products; we create solutions for our customers.”

Egger’s researchers and technicians tackle important issues for the future at its TechCenter in Unterradlberg. This is in order to develop innovations in new products, technologies, bonding agents and production processes for wood based materials.

The work in the laboratories is largely centred on the benefit to the customer and is therefore the basis for Egger’s long-term profitability.

Christine Hintermeyer, development chemist, Chemical Competence Centre, Unterradlberg said: “I enjoy working at a company with such a big innovative spirit. We can bring our own ideas to the table and also turn these into reality.”

In the services area Egger has developed the Virtual Design Studio (VDS). In the HD version a virtual showroom demonstrates how décors can be applied in different room situations.

Various pre-installed room images can be loaded from a room library onto the high quality, colour-accurate 40in touchscreen to show in virtual terms how décors and colours are applied.

This system enables Egger’s customers to easily provide their customers with advice. Egger sees itself as an international company with Tyrolean roots. Its main focus is the European market, but its export markets are also important, starting with Asia via Oceania to the US, where the large product demand is growing.

Using a clever logistics system, all available means of transport are involved – from roads and railways to ships – in order to be able to react quickly at all times to the demand and secure the supply of raw materials.

At the parent plant in St Johann, Tyrol the new high-bay racking warehouse, at a height of 33.6m, provides space for 35,300m3 of wood based materials. The goods are stored automatically using five storage and retrieval machines in a total of 3,040 storage places on 18 levels.

Now boasting more than 9,000 employees, the Egger Group is in a growth phase and is expecting a positive development for the full financial year 2017/2018.

A significant growth for Egger was shown in the first half of the financial year 2017/18 when the company took over a particleboard and MDF plant in Concordia, Argentina – the first time the company was represented with a production site outside Europe.

A further step is already in preparation in the US in planning a greenfield project in Lexington, North Carolina.

The construction of Egger’s 19th plant has already begun in Poland. In Biskupiec, north-east Poland, an ultramodern production plant for 650,000m3 of particleboard is on schedule to be built by the end of 2018.