Xylon Woodwork

Sabina Simović and her brother Damir Krdžović are now the second generation taking care of the family business. Sabina is in charge of sales and marketing, while Damir is taking care of the design strategy and creative development. He studied interior and furniture design, and received his MA at the Royal Danish Academy of Arts in Copenhagen, while Sabina studies business and marketing in Vienna.
The entire company has as many as 40 employees, including five designers. They, and work with three more technical advisors externally, in order to complete the customer jobs they receive, which often means working on the entire house or flat interior, and producing all of the wooden elements and furniture.
They also regularly host interns from Faculty of Forestry, but they mostly run their own program that is not adapted to the actual needs of the company. Their plan is to involve carpentry schools in order to secure few high quality and motivated young professionals.
In terms of distribution, they mostly rely on their own channels, with the exception of kids furniture which was distributed via selected stores in the country. With their future designer furniture brand, they would like to tackle the global market. Their customers are coming form the upper-middle class population, and the products are priced accordingly. A big part of the jobs they do comes from architectural studios with whom they have ongoing collaborations.

The workshop, almost like a factory, takes up around 2000 m², with very nice surroundings and good conditions for the workers. Xylon team seems to be working as one organism, handling multiple jobs and phases of production in parallel.
There is a real teamwork feeling across the rooms, with CNC machines and wood stock taking up most of the space, alongside a coloring and sanding chamber and carefully aligned departments of assembly, polishing or other phases of wood treatment, with the use of so-me of the latest machinery. The design studio is in a separate building alongside the management, but just next to the production line, so the conversation between the designers and the makers is direct and collaborative.

Xylon collaborates with other workshops when it comes to materials such as glass or metal, as their workshop is dedicated to the full cycle of working with wood. Despite the fact that due to the volume of work they would need to work with other colleagues from the wood processing field, they are hesitant and careful to make that step because their goal is maintaining their recognizable quality.
Their primary material is MDF. All of the machines they installed are set in a way to work mainly with this material, above all the three large CNC cutters, including one that can cut in 3D. They are regularly working with other sorts of wood as well.
The workshops is very methodically split between different phases of production. With lots of space and also their own transport and install team, Xylon are able to handle entire interior projects, from sketches, over production, to installation.

Forthcoming brand of Xylon — Tekstura — will work with more than 10 designers from Serbia and from abroad, which is at the same time their biggest project to date. So far, they have been focused on producing unique pieces, but in this project they would like to test serial production and enter the global market.
In recent years, they are increasingly doing work on entire apartments, even outside of Serbia. Prior to that, they were mostly focused on kids furniture which they developed themselves as a mini-brand, with great success. In addition, they are constantly working on individual pieces of furniture, as well as custom kitchens and any other furnishing elements made of wood.