(And now in Mexico!)
Outlook sources a wide range of product categories at all price points for the home furnishings, hospitality and multi-family construction industries from factories located throughout Asia. We maintain offices in Indonesia, China, Philippines, Vietnam and India as well as sourcing and quality control staff in Taiwan and Malaysia. We are ideally suited to take advantage of a wide range of raw materials, vendor capabilities, and price points to meet the requirements of our customers. Our founders and managers have backgrounds in furniture manufacturing, chemical coatings/finishing, quality control, and product testing. Every country has its own unique strengths and Outlook’s presence and local expertise across Asia gives our customers access to the widest range of products and alternatives to provide the best produce choices as well as to help protect against potential high tariffs and anti-dumping situations in some countries.
Our vendor base runs into the hundreds and are among the most capable, highest quality, and most successful manufacturers in Asia. We source products made of wood, metal, stone, concrete, as well as leather and textile upholstery products. Outlook has become an industry leader in sourcing products made with materials such as bamboo, rattan, shell, seagrass, and other natural substances. We have many vendors we have worked with since the company was founded. Many of our vendors have passed social compliance audits for those customers who require compliance certification. Most of our wood products vendors have access to sustainable raw materials with many using lumber certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. We believe in working with vendors who use sustainable and environmentally friendly raw materials.
We work closely with our customers from product inspiration to physical samples. We believe the first step towards achieving a quality product, begins during the product development stage. Our product engineers look for potential construction issues and work to make sure the products that are developed fit within the vendors’ capabilities. The product development stage also allows our product development team to work closely with our customers’ designers and merchants to understand the key attributes and design features they are looking for in new products. Every customer is assigned a team of experienced product development staff including sample development coordinators, product engineers and finishing technicians who work closely with our customers, designers, and vendors to achieve high quality samples.
Our product engineers work closely with our vendors and customers to “value engineer” products as needed to achieve our customers target price points. We develop and maintain detailed information on every item to ensure accurate reproduction as the products progress into manufacturing. Each product development team works under the direction of our account managers and country managers, all of whom have years of “hands-on” experience.
We also have several designers on staff that allow us to offer limited design capabilities to our customers, primarily in retail furniture, which is especially useful for customers who rely on developing new products from products in the vendors showrooms.
Outlook also has a 5000 square feet showroom in our Vietnam office which our customers can use to review and develop new products. The showroom includes a color panel and textile library.
Outlook’s original goal was not to find vendors who could build furniture like it was produced in the USA, but to build furniture in the Asian environment, often in very high humidity conditions, that would survive after they reached homes in the USA. This is especially challenging during the winters when the humidity in the consumers’ homes can reach very low levels. To this day Outlook’s quality management include careful moisture monitoring of wood products, including residential and hospitality furniture, but also products like kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities. While doing end-of-line quality audits for some types of products is acceptable, we know this is not sufficient to ensure quality for wood products like furniture. Outlook is one of the few quality management companies that is engaged in quality control processes during the entire manufacturing process for furniture and many other products, not relying only on finished goods quality audits.
Outlook built the first dedicated home furnishings product testing laboratory in Asia in 2001 and has operated and managed dedicated home furnishings testing labs ever since. It is in our DNA. What Outlook learns in product testing is carried over into our customers’ products and they are used to help improve our vendors’ manufacturing processes. Outlook’s partner company – Outlook Technical Services Pte. Ltd. (“OTS”), operates as a third-party testing laboratory and has testing labs in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and Surabaya, Indonesia. Testing in Philippines is performed at a lab that Outlook formerly owned in Cebu. Together, Outlook’s testing services cover a wide range of products and testing protocols covering construction and physical properties, but also includes packaging tests to international standards to ensure products shipped via common carriers or delivery services like UPS or FedEx that is so common today in eCommerce, will survive the journey from the factory in Asia to the consumer’s home.
Twenty years ago Outlook had one customer, the largest furniture manufacturer in the USA, whose brands sold nearly all their products through national, regional, and ‘mom and pop’ furniture stores, their own branded retail stores, and to-the-trade sales made through interior design firms. Today our customers sell their products through a broad range of retail channels utilizing the latest technologies.
These sales channels include: