After the Successful annual ISO congress in
Warsaw in June 2006, editor Winfried Lambertz of STORES+SHOPS printed this impression of the event:
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The International Shopfitting Organisation ISO
has held its annual congress in Warsaw from 8 to 11 June. The highlights
were the visits to shopping centres and shopfitting companies, as well as the
business seminar on the opportunities and perspectives of shopping centres in Poland. Carsten Schemberg from Germany was elected the new ISO president.
The Warsaw event was already the 48th
annual congress of the ISO International Shopfitting Organisation, the
international union of shopfitting associations and companies, which has its
secretariat in Torna Hällestad near Malmö, Sweden. In Poland ISO is also represented
by a member company, Euro-Image of Halinów near Warsaw, a manufacturer of store
furnishings such as counters, shelves, showcases and display cabinets. The
company, which was founed in 1992, was the first stop on the factory tour at
the outset of the congress. Euro-Image is not only a producer of shop furnishings, it also supplies the retail industry with
shop-window mannequins, displays and other POP advertising material. Euro-Image
has already fitted out more than 1,000 points of sale, mostly fashion
boutiques, bakeries and pastry shops and optician’s outlets. The Roya furniture
factory and the new production unit of Samuelsons Polska were other venues on
the sightseeing tour. Whereas Roya still is a young Polish enterprise, just
like Euro-Image, and has specialised in the production of wooden furniture for
different branches of retail, Samuelsons is on the one hand a supplier of shop furnishings
and technical store equipment, and on the other hand also a general contractor
for turnkey commercial buildings in Poland. Because it forms part of the
Samuelsons Group, with headquarters in Sweden and establishments in Norway and Germany, Samuelson Polska’s customers
profit from the international know-how of the group as far as project
management is concerned. The lasting impression of these factory visits is that
Polish shopfitting has reached a high level of quality in a short time and that
the sector certainly stands up to the competition of western companies. Not
least because of the lower wage level in Poland their shopfittings even find their
way into western Europe, as the references of the
companies visited show.
Shopping
centres expand
There still is an enormous potential for the
shopping centre branch in Poland. Stephen Pragnall, managing
director of the company Apsys Polska, which specialises in the planning and
management of shopping centres, gave in a two-hour talk an impressive outline
of the evolution of large-scale commercial buildings in Poland. Apsys, which
has its headquarters in France, has been active in Poland since 1997 and has realised since
that time 16 shopping centres. The possibly most spectacular object is the
‘manufaktura’ in Lodz, which was completed in May 2006. It is a gigantic entertainment,
cultural and shopping centre located in a thoroughly rehabilitated 19th-century
industrial building. In Warsaw itself, Apsys runs – amongst other
things – the Janki shopping centre, which was also on the visits programme of
the ISO congress, together with Arkadia. The participants could see for
themselves that Arkadia has rightfully been awarded a prize by the
International Council of Shopping Centres (ICSC) in April 2006.
Company visits and business seminars
constituted one side of the ISO congress, a cultural programme and contacts between the participants another. Last year, the
“IS-O-lympics” were the sporting climax of the congress. This year ISO’s
secretary Preben Bailey surprised the participants with a new and original idea
for a contest: on the first night two internationally composed teams competed
to see who would be the fastest to assemble a shelving system. The winning team
received the already traditional ISO Gold Medal: Deborah Barnes (England), Bente Grön-Hansen (Norway), Francois Lefebvre (France) and Winfried Lambertz
(Deutschland), editor of stores+shops.
The next annual ISO
congress will take place on 26-29 April 2007 in Rimini, Italy.
For more information, please contact the ISO
secretariat on iso@thbailey.com
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