With an enviable list of prestigious international awards and many hundreds of global patents for innovation, quality and design – Blum set the standards.

 

But there is a lot more to any Blum product that the user buys into. To start with Blum remains a family-owned company despite now being a worldwide firm employing over 4000 people. The family ethic runs strongly through the company’s structure, attitudes to employees and customers and is behind the overarching philosophy of ‘Global Customer Benefits’ which directs the drive behind all product development.

 

Global Customer Benefits means exactly what it says – namely that everyone who comes into contact with any Blum product derives direct benefits and advantages from its use has – from furniture manufacturers and designers, retailers and fitters and, importantly, end users.

 

Blum UK’s Director of Sales & Marketing David Sanders says that Blum’s success in the UK has down to multiple but important factors and chief among these is the valuable partnership that Blum creates between them and their customers at every level.  “The Blum brand stands for a number of things from our customers’ points of view,” explains David Sanders. “Stability is delivered by quality products designed to outlive the life of the furniture they serve. Customers have come to value given attributes like innovation, product variety and development, innovation, future proofing and service. In the UK in particular Blum has gone to great lengths to establish a high level of consumer awareness which is now also highly valued by our front line customers,” he says.

 

But for all this to have been achieved it is worth looking a little further behind the scenes at Blum. When founder Julius Blum first produced his replaceable horseshoe stud from his forge on the eastern shores of Lake Constance in the Vorarlberg province of Austria over 50 years ago, the company has always stayed true to its home roots. Apart from a manufacturing facility in the USA and now a smaller one in Brazil the great majority of Blum’s production is in the original locality where seven state-of-the-art facilities manufacture the products – 95% of which are exported worldwide through wholly owned national sales and distribution centres or working closely with established independent distributors.

 

To continually design and produce world leading products for all these markets Blum have had to not only depend on but create ‘home grown’ technical talent. The Blum apprenticeship scheme is recognised nationally, throughout Europe and indeed worldwide as a model system.

 

The scheme has grown to the state it is today with 250 apprentices in training (13 of these in the USA) to achieve specialised qualifications for three- and four-year apprenticeships that cover areas like plastic technicians, electricians, machine mechanics, toolmakers, design engineers, production technicians and CNC technicians.  

 

The Blum apprentice scheme is a dual system which involves the participants being employed by Blum while still attending a degree of formal education. Blum takes enormous pride in the fact that since 1970, when the scheme was started, over 60% of the apprentices educated still work in the company. 

 

Perhaps this is because they have access to 33 full-time instructors and a total of 70 instructors for special technical subjects. What makes a Blum apprentice the envy of many of their counterparts in international industry is that they are trained on state-of-the-art machinery before they – the machines – even enter into full production. It is no surprise then that Blum apprentices have a superb medal-winning record in international competitions over the years.

 

Across the whole company Blum engage in schemes that foster creative design and thinking while listening carefully to their customers around the world so that they not only reactively produce solutions. But very much set trends and perfect systems like tool-free technology space provision, planning and motion.