Our call caught the head of the company “Maven Group” from Chornomorsk, Olena Egamova, at customs. Another export problem. Last year, furniture for a restaurant in Dubai was shipped from the company’s workshops to the Persian Gulf region. This time the address is different, but the trouble is the same. If these are export troubles, they are always pleasant for the manufacturer as a whole, no matter how troublesome they are.

And a year ago, in the sewing shop, they cut and sewed in the same way, but not what it is now. Furniture production was idle for a couple of months, and military ammunition was being sewn for the needs of the army and ground defense. Charitably, on a volunteer basis. From own stocks of fabrics and threads. But the cost of foam rubber was compensated by foreign grant funds, which the Ukrainian Association of Furniture Makers helped to obtain.

Sometime in the summer, they began to revive their usual furniture business – and the company specializes mainly in the development and implementation of individual commercial projects – from newly collected orders. There were enough pre-war ones, but they still remain “frozen”, because some customers, frightened by the war, will not dare to give them a “green light”. It is also a pity that the work on some projects is almost finished, but the customers cannot settle due to lack of funds. The situation with foreign customers is better. Take the same already mentioned Dubai. It was also a pre-war order, made before the beginning of the Russian invasion, and there was also a delay in its payment due to the uncertainty of the war, but in the summer the customer still settled, and the furniture was sent to him.

– From your information in social networks, we learned that a large number of commercial projects implemented by the company are located in the capital. Does this trend continue today?

– So. Kyiv always gave us the most orders. It helps even now. When the company was ready to resume work in the summer of last year, it was reported through the same social networks. Architects and designers, with whom we implemented projects before the war, heard us and gradually began to resume cooperation with the company. The projects were not large-scale and massive, but they did – from one to another – and reached the end of the year. Of course, the most difficult thing in the history of the company.

– Those furniture makers who aim for export consider international furniture exhibitions – their participation in them – to be the most important tool, so to speak, for the export promotion of their products. Your company was not among last year’s or this year’s exhibitors.

– Our company has other priorities in the search for foreign clients, which I will not brag about, but they are still showing their effectiveness. I will not deny that the exhibition is a really effective tool for finding and acquiring customers, but not everyone can participate in such costly events “in their pocket”. Especially in the current difficult and economically difficult time.

The company’s export business is already active. We now have a number of potential foreign clients interested in our furniture manufacturing capabilities, with whom we conduct intensive negotiations, make mutually beneficial calculations, and create trial samples of future products.

– During the year of the war, was there any progress in the development of the company?

– The war crossed out all our development plans for last year – first of all, in the expansion of production capacities. With the beginning of the Russian aggression, we found ourselves faced with the need to at least somehow survive, to preserve the collective, rented premises. We succeeded, and we already consider it an achievement in such conditions. And this despite the fact that 99 percent of the pre-war contracts, which were supposed to guarantee the company’s production workload for the whole year, turned out to be “frozen” and remain so.