With the synergy of production capacities in Murski Središće and Sobočan dizajn studio in Zagreb, it offers its clients a complete turnkey service - from design and engineering, drafting to production and installation of furniture and related equipment on the building. The added value of Sobočan design studio is that after the interior design and product design, the project is upgraded by the work of our development team and production, which is completely under one roof. They are guided by the motto: everything works!

The company was founded with 5 employees in the family yard, and today Sobočan has more than 190 employees and hundreds of completed projects and many satisfied customers and partners around the world. We generate more than half of our annual revenues in export markets as an authorized partner of world-renowned brands, mostly in the German-speaking area; in Austria, Germany and Switzerland and other countries of the Western European market.

In a conversation with Mr. Dean, CEO of Sobočan, we talked about the challenges that await us in the post-pandemic period!

Your review of the corona crisis and its impact on certain changes in furniture design?

I’m not saying anything new when I emphasize that COVID19 has changed a lot of that, from our daily functioning all the way to the way we do business, the habits we had, which of course had an effect on furniture design as well. Design studios had the challenge to quickly adapt to new market needs, to be extra creative in solutions as well as to create a product that would give customers added value at a time when every new day was uncertain. These were also the motives of our design team who, I believe, quite successfully, adapted to the new normal and created a product that met all the requirements of modern business. Of course it is our brand movo, which we are extremely proud of.

We see that you have launched a new product this year (I mean the language), is this your response to labor market trends? More and more people are working from home?

With the changes brought about by the corona crisis, we wanted to harness the potential of our team of designers and show that we are a company ready to respond to any challenge. movo was born as an idea at the beginning of the first lockdown last year, and it took our designers only a couple of months to make the design, in cooperation with the engineering team and production prototypes were created, performed the necessary tests, obtained certificates.In early September 2020 movo at Zagreb Design Week. In the months that followed, prestigious awards in furniture design and innovation began to arrive, such as: German innovation award 2021; Iconic awards for innovative interial design 2021, BIGSEE wood design award 2021, etc. Given that people are increasingly used to working outside the office, in their homes, I believe we have a product that solves all their challenges when they need to work from home.

How do you comment on new trends in the labor market and new concepts of office space? Will it come to life or is it only temporary until the situation with the Covida-19 pandemic stabilizes?

We are witnessing the evolution of office concepts. Old concepts of office business were already in decline with generational changes in employee habits, productivity on the one hand and the balance of private and work is a topic that has been current for years, and I think the situation with Covid-19 is only accelerated the changes that were desperately needed. It will be interesting to follow the development of the situation, but what is certain is that new models are waiting for us, somewhere more, somewhere less, I mean industries. Our experience with language placement confirms this with each passing day.

Your plans for 2022?

In general, the focus is on raising the quality of services and products through business optimization, taking into account sustainability and environmental impact. More specifically, in the first quarter of next year, the installation of a solar power plant with a nominal power of 500 kw will be completed, which will significantly reduce gas consumption. We continue to procure raw materials exclusively from verified sources and our products have FCS certificates. At the moment, we are waiting for a wire processing plant, which we ordered in the USA, a machine that will give us new possibilities in wire processing, while consuming less energy than the machines it will replace. Of course, we continue with the further education of employees, the continuation of the started digital transformation of the company, which will ultimately result in the creation of a modern industrial business concept, Industry 4.0. We are very much looking forward to the years ahead because they also bring the development of the movo brand, the placement of a new product whose development we are working on, the acquisition of new clients in the domestic and foreign markets and much more.