Australian flooring company Style Limited has announced plans to expand its production base to other parts of the world with an innovative transportable factory that mirrors its China manufacturing base.
The ‘mobile’ manufacturing breakthrough follows a 12-month research program undertaken by Style in partnership with Flinders University’s Molecular Technologies Research Centre in Adelaide, South Australia and partly funded by the Australian Federal Government
The result is a ‘transportable strand woven fact.ory’ that can be installed to existing wood finishing factories anywhere in the world to manufacture strand woven products using locally available soft wood species such as Poplar in the United States or Blue Gum in Australia.
Style’s chief executive officer Peter Torreele said the partnership with Flinders University has now developed a model for an exportable and economically viable manufacturing cell to produce strand woven products outside of China, by designing an international block factory with a similar cost base to China due to advanced automation.
“The model has been designed to be an ‘add-on module’ to existing wood flooring finishing factories anywhere in the world and we are in discussions with wood flooring manufacturers to form strategic partnerships for licensing of this patented technology, thereby creating a new revenue stream for the Company,” Torreele said.
Until now, strand woven products have only been manufactured in China because the existing manufacturing process — which is extremely labour intensive - has not been able to be replicated outside China due to raw material sourcing and manufacturing cost issues.
Style’s highly automated international block factory will use locally available wood species anywhere in the world as input material, which will enable to manufacture and bring to market an entire new range of strand woven wood products, based on domestic soft wood species such as Poplar, Australian Blue Gum, Oak, Hickory, etc.
The Melbourne-based company was the first company in the world to introduce strand woven flooring products, in 2004.
It uses Chinese Moso Bamboo as a low value and fast growing ‘green’ input material and transforms it into a solid floor that matches the strength and durability of a 150 year old exotic hardwood rival — thereby saving tropical forests and native hardwood plantations.
