Staying one step ahead

Marco Santori, owner of Sesa SpA, headquartered in Olgiate Olona in northern Italy, not far from Milan, says that his company has a truly global market, exporting 95% of its production.

Among the regions that are showing sales growth for the company are Russia, Turkey, South America and, to some extent, an awakening market in North America.

"We are still a small family-owned company [he has two sons employed in the business] and that is a good thing for us because we can handle difficult markets more easily. We are very proud to be able to position our company at the top of the worldwide market and we intend to maintain that position," says Mr Santori.

"We are investing a lot of money in marketing and sales actions and in innovations to be introduced this year in our production. These innovations are in the quality and quantity/cost areas."

They follow many earlier innovations such as Sesa's entry into digital transfer of designs to press plates in 2007.

However, the latest ground-breaking development for the company is the culmination of a project started in December 2010 and presented at the Interzum exhibition in Cologne in May of 2011.

The idea was to create an application, or 'app', for the iPad through which the company could showcase its surface textures in a very comprehensive way.

"Initially, this was intended as a tool for our sales guys, with the complete catalogue of our range to show to customers, but we then realised the potential for a full app available to our customers to download to their iPads," says Mr Santori.

Thus it was that the company launched the "iSESA Friendly" app in the Apple app store as a free download.

Having entered their username and password in the normal way and downloaded the app, the user taps the iPad screen to bring up an image of a plate.

He or she then has the possibility to surf among Sesa's textures and to choose one from each of the nine different categories, eg hand scraped, wood grain, fancy, geometric, etc and to select a texture and then watch the effect of the natural light on that virtual surface; by tilting the iPad, the effect of different angles of incidence of the light on the texture can be simulated extremely realistically.

The user can then select a decor from a library of solid colours and apply it to the chosen texture. He or she can then again test the effect of light incidence on the surface by tilting the device.

Any chosen design/colour combination can then be saved in 'Favourites' for later review, or another selection made.

Another feature allows the user to take a photograph, using the iPad's own camera, of a surface that he or she likes, such as carbon fibre, a particular textile, etc, and to combine that with their chosen design and colour.

From Favourites, they can then choose to send that design to a colleague or customer of theirs.

The app is aimed at architects and designers, who, if they like what they see, can go to iSESA Partner, under "contact" and fill in a form to request a password to the next level, which includes more design choices.

"Initial users get a limited choice of textures - one per category - and a solid colour palette. If they want more choice, then they have to register and that gives them access to the full range of surfaces available from Sesa," explains Mr Santori.

For obvious reasons of copyright and so on, Sesa cannot put the range of decors of the decor printers such as Schattdecor, Süddekor, Interprint, etc on the app.

However, the iPad's camera gives the possibility for users to very simply add photographs of any chosen decor to their chosen texture.

Issuing of the passwords is under the control of Sesa so that they are not issued to anyone to whom Sesa does not wish to give full access to its catalogue.

Having selected a design/colour combination that he or she likes, the user can then switch to a virtual view of a real laminate.

This is not a 'static' app of course. "Every time we make an improvement to the app, existing registered users will receive a notification in the normal way - and we can update the textures from our offices here," explains Mr Santori.

The creation of this app means that Sesa has removed the time and cost involved in dispatching samples and catalogues around the world.

"We are always one step ahead," says Mr Santori.

In support of this claim, he points out that Sesa was the first company to produce embossed in register, or 'EIR' surfaces. These came first for flooring in 1999 and subsequently, in 2004, for melamine surfaces used in furniture manufacture.

Many people do not realise that in fact the terms 'embossed in register' and 'EIR' are registered trademarks of Sesa SpA but often use the term as though it is a generic description of a surface in which the grain appearance matches its feel, to put it simply. You have been warned - it is a trade mark of
Sesa SpA.

Mr Santori is proud of that achievement because it brought a whole new reality to the 'artificial' surface provided by a decor paper and took such surfaces to a completely new level.

Before EIR, the best printed paper in the world could only look like wood or stone or whatever - and then only from certain angles.

The advent of EIR meant that the texture of a wood or natural stone grain could be impressed into the panel surface, in register with that grain, so that the surface not only looked like real wood or stone, but the texture showed up visually as well, while the feel of the surface was just like the real thing, completing the 3-D picture, so to speak.

Even those with long experience of wood can be fooled by these realistic surfaces into thinking they are the real thing.

Like most companies, Sesa works in a competitive market. It is also a fashion-driven market and that means that constant innovation in the technical field, as well as constant updating of the designs on offer, is essential to its survival.

Making designers and customers aware of what those new designs look like in a timely and appealing way is the reason that Sesa developed its app for the ipad - that and "staying one step ahead".