Maruni – Japan’s leading brand in the field of classic furniture
Maruni Wood Industry, founded in 1928, continues to apply the prominent woodworking craftmanship handed down from previous generations while collaborating with renowned designers to create beautiful furniture collections. The factory, nestled in the quiet and green mountains of Hiroshima, is surrounded by an environment that is ideal for product development, manufacture, and quality control. They strive every day to maintain their high standard of craftsmanship while keeping a flexible attitude and without shying away from new challenges.
Our vision: To continue creating wood furniture recognized as the “Global Standard” 100 or more years into the future.
Sustainability policy
They will continue to produce wooden furniture recognized as a new global icon for hundreds of years to come. This is their corporate mission, which inspires them to believe that it is vital to keep an eye on sustainability in all their operations, whether it concerns material procurement, manufacturing processes, quality control, or logistics control. They strive to integrate sustainability and design and to improve them by applying the lessons and achievements that they have gained from their experience and by identifying challenges that might come up in the future. They aim to develop themselves as a manufacturer of wooden furniture that can be used and loved by multiple generations.
Maruni Collection: Setting New Standards for the Global Market
The “Hiroshima” series was released in 2008 with the aims of looking into what exactly Maruni Wood Industry should be creating and of trying to throw light on the starting point for the company’s activities. This new venture was entered into in partnership with the internationally renowned Japanese product designer Naoto Fukasawa. Their aim was to create furniture that combines robustness with designs that will remain fresh and vital in a hundred years’ time.
The items released every year on the international market by Maruni Wood Industry are known as the “Maruni Collection”. Naoto Fukasawa has been playing the key role in creating these designs, and it was his efforts that have resulted in the birth of the “Hiroshima” series. Fukasawa has made the following comment about this:
Chairs that have hitherto come to be regarded as standard internationally have been imbued with that distinctive sense of warmth of the hand-made that characterizes crafts products rather than emphasizing design qualities. What this collection is aiming at is the realization of a highly detailed and clean image, while at the same retaining this sense of human warmth.
In order to create new standards of the highest quality, there is a need for technology rooted in a thorough knowledge of wood and furniture production in connection with form, seating comfort, the combination of robust structure and lightness for ease of handling, and delicate finishing that makes the most of the superior qualities of wood.
It isn’t a question of ensuring that every whim of the designer is able to achieve realization. A perfectly finished product comes into being only when it incorporates knowledge and ideas rooted in the experience of engineers.
This is the approach that they all share and which they apply to the joint creation of their products. The “Hiroshima” series in particular reflects the Japanese aesthetic as applied to wood and the skills that make it possible for this aesthetic to be brought to life in everyday contexts. Products in this series therefore have a natural wood finish with almost no paint or varnish.
The “Hiroshima” series presented at the Milan Salone in 2009 attracted a great deal of attention and is now supplied to 20 countries around the world, including the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, the United States, and so on. These are products that fuse an international design sense with Japan’s unique aesthetic as applied to wood and intricate manufacturing skills. They may thus be thought of as items of furniture projected by Japan into the world and created in the manner unique to Maruni Wood Industry and, as such, they represent a crystallization of beauty born out of craft skills.
Since 2010, Maruni Wood Industry has worked with Naoto Fukasawa as art director to take their first steps toward establishing the Maruni Collection throughout the world as a brand of distinctively Japanese furniture. Beginning in 2011, they are joined by designer Jasper Morrison as they strive to elevate the Maruni Collection to even higher recognition.
Maruni Wood Industry will continue to create beautiful Japanese furniture that strikes a chord amongst people all over the world.
