WoodDigest.com |

Interzum, of course, is the biennial global event where suppliers to the furniture industry show off their latest products and ideas. Usually, it’s a veritable Epcot Center of design and materials, with competitors vying to outdo one another with outrageous opulence and hospitality.

Picture a full-service “biergarten” where attendees in the latest Italian business wear are served sausages, schnitzel and frothy German beer by attractive women in traditional bräuhaus costumes. Even exhibitors from Asia, the United States and elsewhere get into the when-in-Rome spirit. Fun is had, business is done, and the normal existential wear-and-tear of a four-day trade show is briefly forgotten.

This year, not so much. As with every major industry event, many familiar companies either scaled back or bailed out of Interzum. Some are truly in financial dire straits; others succumbed to that flawed but all too-common knee-jerk logic: “Sales are down! We’d better cut our marketing budget and delay that new product introduction!”

As conventional wisdom — not to mention the lessons of Marketing 101 — tell us, in lean times our marketing dollar goes farther. This is also the best time to rethink and reinvent your products, their uses and even your company itself. Or, as the pop-culture business gurus like to say, “Evolve or die.”

Fortunately, there were several excellent examples of this brand of true grit on exhibit at Interzum 2009. One of the most notable was German company Resopal, the venerable HPL supplier that’s often referred to as “Europe’s Formica,” which is a little ironic since Resopal is now owned by Wilsonart.

It must be said here that one of Resopal’s greatest corporate assets is its managing director, Donald Schaefer. Having a chief executive that can give you the details of the company’s latest products, applications and marketing vision is not, sadly, very common these days. An MD that is still at a trade fair on its last day, and a Saturday to boot (when most other exhibitors’ top brass stayed only for the first two days, if they showed up at all), that’s unusual. And an MD willing to have an impromptu hour-long sit-down with a foreign journalist? Well, that’s all but unheard of.

Resopal’s mission, called “Resopal Rooming,” is to elevate HPL from a basic furniture surface to an ideal material for most if not all interior applications.