Chandelier Makers Thrive With Innovative Upmarket Products

Chandelier makers in Taiwan today are moving in one of two directions. One group is producing other types of lamps as well as chandeliers and packaging them as sets to meet the trend toward one-stop shopping, and a smaller group is continuing to concentrate on chandeliers together with matching floor, table, and wall lamps for customers who want whole series of products.

According to one experienced manufacturer in the line, the island's chandelier makers are so close together in basic competitiveness that their success or failure will be determined by design capability and level of quality.

Wide Variety for Customer Choice

One of the leading local chandelier manufacturers is the Verona Lighting Co., which makes indoor decorative lighting and depends on chandeliers for about 80% of its revenues. It also designs and produces series products, including table, floor, and wall lamps.

Ted Chung, the firm's chairman, says that most of the design concepts for his series lamps originate in chandeliers, which usually require more detailed design, more parts, and more complicated production processes than other lamps. The chandelier, he comments, is the heart and soul of a lamp series.

The chairman says that the company tries to outshine its competitors through maximized selection of lamp designs, from classical and traditional to contemporary models. The capability to do this has attracted design and production orders from more and more foreign customers for complicated and relatively difficult-to-make models.

Verona currently operates a plant in Zhongshan, in the mainland Chinese province of Guangdong. This is a highly integrated facility that handles most of the lamp production and processing work, including welding, pipe-winding, the production of polyresin parts, assembly, the production of some fabric-shade parts, and packaging.

About 70 of the plant's 700 employees make up its development team, which in turn is divided into groups responsible for design, blueprint drawing, and mold/die development and sampling. The team develops approximately 1,000 new lamp models every year.

Chung laments the growing competition that comes from new ideas and new entrants in the industry. As a result, he says, the market life of a chandelier model has been shortened to just eight to 10 months, compared with five years in the past.

The chairman says that his company meets the competition by relentlessly boosting its development capabilities and offering lamps that conform to contemporary trends in interior decoration. It focuses on the middle- to high-end market, which puts more importance on quality than on price, thereby avoiding cutthroat price competition.

All of Verona's lamps are exported, mainly to the U.S., Oceania, and the Middle East.

Everything the Customer Desires

Another major Taiwanese player in the line is the Jaya Enterprise Co., an experienced and versatile maker of floor lamps, wall lamps, and table lamps, in addition to chandeliers. Unlike most counterparts, Jaya aims its business development at Europe. This Euro-centric strategy, says the firm's president, James Yang, requires superb design, quality, and product safety.

The company's product development unit has 10 professional staffers who scan trade magazines and participate in lighting shows to keep up with worldwide changes in the lighting market, allowing them to formulate new ideas and turn those ideas into fashionable products. The unit develops an average of more than 50 lamp models a month, about 10 of which will go into mass production.

Jaya uses small-batch, large-variety production to augment its product line and maintain reasonable profit margins. The key to his long-term success, Yang comments, is to aim at the high-end European market and offer lamps at prices that are far lower than similar European-made products.

Quality, the president emphasizes, is a comprehensive term that encompasses employee concepts, control of the quality of all upstream parts suppliers, and use of only the highest-quality lamp accessories. In the European market, he notes, safety is especially important, and for this reason his products conform to all relevant safety standards there.

Jaya moved its production to Zhongshan in mainland China several years ago in a bid to strengthen its competitiveness by keeping costs down. The mainland facility currently has an in-house production ratio of about 40%, with operations that include pipe bending, metal stamping, welding, and hardware production.

The small-batch, large-variety production mode, Yang says, gives his company the ability to provide just about anything its customers need. Other attractive features, he claims, include on-time delivery, superior quality, and comprehensive before- and after-sales services. As a result, his lamps are popular in Europe, especially in areas with high living standards such as Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

Strong Development, Sterling Manufacturing

The Tigon Group has also gained a foothold in the international lighting market through strong development and manufacturing capabilities. The company boasts more than 100 patents on knockdown lampshades and chandeliers, and on nanotechnology. Strong competitiveness in the global market is also assured by giving top priority to quality--all Tigon products meet international quality and safety certification standards, including UL, GS, CE, CUL, BS, and CQC. The company's factories are ISO9001- and ISO9002-certified.

The group's two major affiliates, Tigon Lighting Manufacturing Ltd. And Dongguan Penhall Lighting Co., have a combined work force of 4,000. A tenth of that number are experts who handle design and R&D work to meet differing market needs, introducing new fashion-leading designs every year. The products are exported to the U.S. and Europe.

After moving into the mainland more than 10 years ago, the Tigon Group became one of the leading lighting manufacturers there. At its 940,000-square-foot site in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, the group operates seven factories, a headquarters building, three showrooms, and five employee dormitories.

The group carries out stamping, forging, spinning, ending, cutting, and scrolling, as well as other processes, in its own hardware plant. In addition, there is a welding department where acetylene, braze, and electrode welding is done.

To ensure a good finish, dozens of grinders made especially for the grinding of hardware components of various sizes are used. Color treatment is handled by air-pressure spray painting, powder coating, manual painting, and the application of clear lacquer.

Tigon constantly strives to develop newer and better materials for lamp parts and accessories. The group set up a facility for the fabrication of polyresin materials at the Dongguan complex in 1999, where it now has more than 1,200 employees. This kind of material, the group claims, heightens the quality of its lighting fixtures.

For its lampshades, Tigon uses a wide variety of materials ranging from fabric, tiffany, mica, and paper to wood strops, buckskin, and beads. Six hundred workers are engaged in the crafting of lampshades at a maximum output of about one million pieces a month.