Ambiente Cucina an interview with Gianmaria Dolfo

The August/September issue of Ambiente Cucina magazine (no. 227), featured an interesting interview with Gianmaria Dolfo, CEO of GD Arredamenti: “Never forget where you’ve come from when looking towards the future”.

A new leadership and corporate structure, a more streamlined and fresh organisation, above all with regard to sales and marketing, and a strategy focused on distribution and exports, without forgetting the company’s origins and production history.
These are the new guidelines for GD Arredamenti, a company that has been able to relaunch itself and set high expectations for the future, despite the crisis.
The company’s CEO, Gianmaria Dolfo, tells us all about it.

How did you react to the crisis in the industry?

We were affected just like everyone else, but we also had the clarity of mind to look ahead, defining a different strategy and organisation, and cutting our costs with choices that were sometimes painful. My father’s pride and determination, shared by myself and our co-workers, were of great support
when times got hard, and we never seriously considered abandoning the industry. Quite the contrary, it was our desire to relaunch ourselves…

How is GD Arredamenti currently structured?

Our history dates back to 1969 when my father, Giuseppe Dolfo, founded the company, and it continues today with determination, and with a brand new corporate structure. This move allowed us to be among the few companies in the kitchen industry to survive Italy’s disastrous economic crisis. Today, the company is present on the market with three separate divisions: “Kitchen Collections”, offering trendy, modern kitchen designs, “Living Collection” and “Classic Collections”, offering bespoke wooden furniture and kitchens with a classic style, and “Bathroom Collections”, offering wooden bathroom furniture, heat-treated and non heat-treated, with a modern design.

Your history is linked to your expert skills in working with wood, a material that’s now back in fashion. How does your company interpret this material today?

Wood has always been part of GD Arredamenti’s DNA. We’ve been running a woodworking studio in Romania for more than 20 years, where we buy logs from foresters and transform them into components for our best kitchens. For us, wood has never been a question of passing trends, it’s a passion that drives us to go above and beyond and to innovate in terms of both content and aesthetics. A perfect example of this is the 3S technique that we created. This is a door made entirely from three overlapping layers of natural or stained Oak or Larch. This solution provides our wooden doors with maximum reliability and durability, even without the use of a frame, creating a more modern and ‘clean’ look.

What does “classic contemporary” mean for GD Arredamenti?

It means expressing contemporary design features that go beyond passing fads. This is not an exercise in style but, rather, the fruit of our research into the right relationship between form and function, which involves using materials that are resistant to long-term wear. This is also the reason why kitchens have to be modern and classic at the same time, “timeless” as the British might say. The key features of GD Arredamenti’s design culture are respect and a sense of rationality, order, balance, proportion and harmony. All concepts that are valid in any era.

At times like this, does paying close attention to content not risk increasing costs, and therefore prices, to levels that aren’t very compatible with current market dynamics?

The risk is always there, but, funnily enough, focusing on content, and I’m referring in particular to materials such as wood, does not necessarily have to mean an increase in costs, as long as said content is accompanied by an integrated production approach and isn’t weighed down by quantity-based reasoning (purchasing volumes, stock, warehouses, machines, etc.). Also with regard to pricing, as with aesthetics, we try to keep things in proportion, with products that are made to satisfy those who own and use them.

More generally, what’s your view on the current market and the future prospects for Italian kitchen manufacturers?

I think that we need to move our focus from the “product” to the “project”. And, as I already mentioned, from the “manufacturing” of the product to its “distribution”. Low-cost kitchens are increasingly the prerogative of large retailers, supplied by large-scale manufacturers whose costs and levels of productivity are able to support their margins despite the low prices imposed by the prevailing logic across Europe.

In this sense, unfortunately for us Italians, the sheer size and organisation of large German companies, and the low costs of large operators in developing markets, have the winning hand over Italy’s typically fragmented industries. On the other hand, there is great appreciation for “Made in Italy” kitchens abroad, especially in the more demanding, higher end of the market.
Ultimately, there is potential for Italian companies that are able to pay close attention to both the content and the quality of their products, that are able to provide ad hoc solutions to meet the needs of designers, and that offer an appropriate level of service. Always keeping a close eye on distribution issues.

What are you doing to move in this direction?

Taking Italian market developments into consideration, we’re aiming to have fewer dealers, opting for those who are more specialized and who work in partnership with the company. Dealers able to promote the value of designs for the home and quality, not just focus on prices. We’re always carefully looking at the potential of exports, which already account for more than 50% of GD Arredamenti’s turnover. With regard to international markets, our next move will be to open a showroom in Indonesia, to add to the ones already present in New York, Hong Kong, London and Moscow. We’re also close to opening another one in Abu Dhabi which is very important for us. Our showrooms are our ambassadors, real “exhibitions” to promote GD Arredamenti.

What is your company’s ultimate mission?

Our furnishing philosophy and our kitchen designs include everything that makes Italy extraordinary: history, traditions, beauty and the ability to design and create things that go beyond the conventional. Materials and methods are not enough, you need to be skilled, taking inspiration from the expertise of Venetian craftsmen of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Right from the very beginning, our company has always tried to combine the skills of the mirror makers, “Marangoni” carpenters, upholsterers and stonemasons who worked in the palaces and villas around Venice, Asolo and countryside around Treviso and Vicenza.

We chose to interpret the values of this traditional craftsmanship and to use their techniques and expert practices, translating it all into modern design.
Luckily for us, there’s an important niche of customers out there.