TW Flooring Group (Pennsauken, N.J.), formerly Tesoro Woods, has launched a joint venture with Natural Woods Design (Guatemala City, Guatemala) dubbed TW Design, offering hand-scraping and staining services for North American wood flooring manufacturers and importers.
TW Flooring Group (Pennsauken, N.J.), formerly Tesoro Woods, has launched a joint venture with Natural Woods Design (Guatemala City, Guatemala) dubbed TW Design, offering hand-scraping and staining services for North American wood flooring manufacturers and importers.
In the past, much of this type of work has been done either in China or within the U.S. prison system, said William Jopling, CEO for TW Flooring Group. The U.S. antidumping and countervailing duty rate, labor, currency exchange and freight costs led Jopling to establish an alternative to manufacturing in China, he said.
In addition to hand scraping and staining, the full slate of services from TW Design includes product design, manufacturing and milling, and finishing and packaging. "Typically, OEM customers provide their wood platform or lumber to fabricate the flooring faces, in which case we then supply the substrate and all the handwork," Jopling said. Natural Woods Design provides manufacturing for TW Design, while TW Design manages customer services and logistics from the U.S.
Current customers of TW Design include Mannington Wood Floors (Salem, N.J.), Cikel Brasil Verde (Curitiba, Brazil) and TerraMai (Medford, Ore.).