President’s Letter
Dec 3rd, 2008 Posted in Recent News |
When we started Decorative Living in March of 2003, the goal was to create a company founded on the principal of “We”. That meant having the company managed by people who take responsibility and truly care about fellow employees, our customers, our customers’ “guests”, our factories and people with challenges. That also meant designing products that are original, creative, functional and environmentally friendly.
Of course, that whole process is an evolution fraught with lots of little and a few huge bumps in the road. In just five years, we have grown to become a meaningful influence in the Natural Fiber Home Furnishings Industry with our products being carried in nearly every major retailer in North America with significant inroads in Europe, South America and Asia. We are proud to say that the major portion of our products are produced from easily renewable resources such as leaves, weeds and quick-growing reeds, hand-woven by craftsman around the world who get to work in a safe and pleasant environment and finished with non-toxic vegetable stains in our own factories. In addition, we are well on our way in our project to teach people in impoverished parts of the world how to make our type of products with proper quality controls so that they can have long term self-employment as a means of support and lessoning their long term need to turn toward charities for support.
As Decorative Living has evolved, there are so many factors that are helping us achieve our goals it would be too voluminous to delineate here but a few highlights are:
Creative Designers - Nearly 200 new products designed weekly to enable each of our retail clients to differentiate. Most of our designers come out of the world of Furniture. This is done to help make sure we are focusing on quality and design first and then price points afterward.
Operations – Production inspectors work in conjunction with our designers at each inspection to ensure superior quality controls and at the same time maintain the design integrity of the Creative Team. We also test the various materials in each country to determine their true strengths and weaknesses in regards to ability to maintain color, structure during shipping, while on the selling floor and in your homes with various temperatures and humidity levels. Where necessary, we have stockpiled certain raw materials to help keep consistency throughout the lifetime of a program.
Technology – We have been attempting to provide the latest in technologies for communications, order processing, product testing and Point-of-Sale Analysis
We decided to create this website in order to help enable us to get the word out about what we are doing, where we are going and providing a means by which where others might join us in our journey. For anybody that takes the time to read this note, thank you for your attention and please feel free to comment on how we are doing and offer any suggestions on how we might improve.
Ira R. Adler
President/CEO
