Teak Quality

Before you go on with the purchase, please take a look at our teak quality standards and assure yourself about the outstanding quality of the product which you can acquire.

Origin

Our teak timber comes from three different sources: One source is from Indonesia. Our partner there, INDO-TEAK, is a parastatal company in the teak production business, owning more than a thousand hectares of plantations. These plantations are in former rainforest areas, so that the rainforest is only destroyed once and henceforth a low-maintenance monoculture is established. The state regulatory authority provides every German customer with a certificate that assures the sustainability and environmental-friendliness of the garden and colonial furnitures when they are bought.
As of late, some of our products are manufactured in our second supply region namely made of Costa Rican and Ecuadorean teak. The teak tree is obviously not native to these regions, however, cheap labor and land prices in the aforementioned regions assure our suppliers that they are investing in the right market. After approximately 20 years, our high quality teak plantations are ready for harvest – in a natural environment, teak trees require up to 80 years to reach full growth. As you can see, we put high emphasis on effiecency, while we even have surpassed natural speeds
We also receive a portion of our teak timber from Burma. As there do not exist any plantations, we harvest the teak trees directly from the natural Burmese forests. We sell this special timber under the nice name Burma-Teak.

Environment

We always have environmental organizations tell us that Teak plantations are not sustainable and they degrade biodiversity. This is of course wrong!
Plantations do not destroy the rainforest nor biodiversity, as the forest was already demolished before the plantations were established. Otherwise, the plantations would have never come into existence. Furthermore, biodiversity is not affected by plantations, as we make sure that something such as biodiversity does not come into existence in our monocultures.
We apply barrels of herbicides and pesticides, but you, the We apply barrels of herbicides and pesticides, but you, the consumer of our garden furniture, don’t have to face negative effects. If your bare skin comes into contact with the timber, there may be skin rashes, but don’t worry, it vanishes completely in two to three months.
Let’s keep this to ourselves: Does it really change your life in any way when somewhere in Asia, a few trees less are left standing?

Social Standards

Just as the environment is an important topic, so are working conditions in the plantations and furniture manufacturing areas.
Setting up our plantation displaced a village of 250 people, so in attempt to be fair, we employed two men from this community and we permitted the other townspeople to build houses around the plantation. An armed security service guards the entrance to the plantation to protect the wood for your luxurious arm-chairs, chairs from being stolen, and to ensure its safety from being used for firewood for his family of nine.
When we spray our plantations with herbicides and pesticides, we let the plantation workers and the surrounding townspeople know that the chemical manufacturers ensure that the pesticides have no adverse health effects. We care about the health of our employees and townspeople. Our factory is in Cambodia and Vietnam because the wages in Indonesia and Burma are too high. All of our factory workers are between 8 and 15 years old, and they work 12 hour days with no more than a 15 minute break per day - all this rules are enforced by our supervisors. In thanks to our hard working employees in Cambodia and Vietnam, our European central office sends them a gift of three rubber balls to be used in the local kindergarden for Christmas every year.

Legality

A massive problem with the international timber and furniture business is illegal harvesting and trading.
In Indonesia, the former private - now parastatal owned - company INDOTEAK took over the land belonging to a town with help from the military forces. For this purpose, one only needed to give a one time six-figure euro sum allowance to the responsible military commander. Since then, our local partner is a proud landowner in Indonesia and we guarantee you the highest quality
To ensure that our plantation complies with all legalities, we certify ourselves with our self-written legal and sustainability seal. The head director is personally signing a water safety agreement for the region seal that was signed personally by the head of the directorate of the region’s water protection administration. In Burma the legal terms and conditions are much simpler. We work directly with the government that grants us cuting licenses and quotas. To show you how effective this partnership is, the government uses the weapons, that we delivered, to protect us from non-violent protesting Monks. Thereby, we personally could closely examine if our delivered weapons are really operational.
The Burmese government wants to thank you, dear customer, for your continued support of our operations and the continuing oppression of large parts of the population. Finally, with your decision to buy our furniture you have made possible, that we can gaze into the bright and happy eyes of the military junta.

Price

Since we are not concerned about the environment, rainforest preservation, or the living conditions of the timely displaced population and children working in our manufacturing plants, and since we do not care about the support by corrupted, violent and illegitimate regimes, it is thus possible for us to offer you furniture at the lowest price.
It’s almost like you are simply stealing the furniture. Although we can’t demand from you to do this, we have decided to provide the timber for this exclusive furniture and deliver it to Europe!

Only stealing is cheaper? We have already stolen!


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