The sample book: product of craftsmanship or industry?
Producing a sample book is a serial activity nowadays. The increasingly advanced technologies available to the industrial world make the production processes progressively standardised, so it becomes a ‘photocopy’ object. But before this rapid technological evolution, the sample book was made by hand, piece by piece: its nature is therefore that of a craft product.
The sample book as an artisan product
The sample book is beautiful to look at when each piece is a unique but homogeneous box within a whole and the two become mutually necessary: there is no coherent whole if the parts are not individually presented in harmony with their neighbours. Moreover, the logic with which the sample book is constructed, the small details that make it recognisable as an object of presentation of a given company, the most diverse needs to be satisfied in a single product make its design a true creative process. As soon as the idea passes from the theoretical to the practical stage, the craftsmanship takes a long time, necessary to be certain that the various phases have been carried out correctly: cutting the material to be sampled, gluing it in the predefined position within the set of colours, quality control for which the operator must be certain that the final product corresponds exactly to the initial project.
The sample book as an industrial product
On the other hand, we live in a world where the need to innovate is ever more time-consuming, and the world of fashion, furniture and design is no exception: new collections are released ever more quickly, which means that the related sample collections have to be renewed several times a year.
It is from the need to respond promptly to these changes that the sample industry has speeded up by adopting technologies that make it capable of mass production, like any other industrial product. The machinery certainly makes it possible to supply a large number of copies of a sample book in a single working day, but an industrially assembled sample book runs the risk of errors during the transition between the different stages These errors can be difficult to notice when the production speed is so high. To realise an error only at the end of the job, once it has been repeated in ‘copy-paste’ on all the other samples in the same order, means losing precious time that was previously saved thanks to the speed of the machinery.
Our answer: Kimoco’s techno-craftsmanship
So what is best for a sample manufacturer to do? Carve out only a very small part of the market by manually following the various stages of assembly and inspection to minimise the risk of making mistakes, or become more competitive by industrialising the samples at the expense of quality? For Kimoco, people have always been our strong point, but at the same time we have wanted to respond to the increasingly demanding requirements of the market, so over the years we have refined our techno-craftsmanship. Thanks to the development of this concept, we are able to deal with large quantities of samples, guaranteeing the qualitative excellence of each one. Our collaborators are not only operators of the machinery with which we create our products, but they are true craftsmen who, phase after phase, create a final product that is cared for as if it were a unique piece, faithful to the project conceived by the customer and complete with the customisable details requested of us. The trust in our people and the investments made in technologies designed to produce in series without affecting the final result make Kimoco’s samples not only products, but services with which every day of our long experience we help the customer to achieve his goal: to present his company and its products in a unique and effective way.