There are three generations of the Vagh family entrepreneurs who are part of MAS Furniture in Mysuru: Abuli Vagh (Founder and Managing Partner), his son Shabbir Vagh (Managing Director), and Shabbir’s nephew, Ali Vagh (Business Development Manager). They have worked on several advantages offered by the family-owned Vagh Group of companies to forge a formidable name in furniture manufacturing. Their repertoire spans the hospitality, home, hostel, kitchen, office seating and retail sectors. Dhananjay Sardeshpande spent time at their state-of-the-art factory recently to learn how they do it.

Three generations of the Vagh family running MAS Furniture in Mysuru: Abuli Vagh (Founder and Managing Partner, sitting), Shabbir Vagh (Managing Director, left) and Ali Vagh (Business Development Manager).

Around the time India gained independence, Mulla Abdul Hussain Sultanjee of Sidhpur, in Gujarat, established a trading company dealing in industrial hardware, machine tools and spares in Chennai. His three sons joined the business and extended its footprint to Coimbatore, Bengaluru and Hyderabad.

Jump forward a couple of generations and we had Moiz Vagh and his brothers entering the manufacturing domain after buying a sick plywood unit in Hunsur, near Mysuru.

In 1961 the renowned Hunsply brand was established manufacturing moisture-resistant, boiling-water-resistant and flexible grades of commercial and decorative plywood, along with veneered timber boards and flush doors. (Look up the Nov-Dec 2018 edition of WoodNews for more information on Hunsply).

“In those days running a plywood factory in the middle of nowhere wasn’t easy,” recalls Abuli about the extended Vagh family’s “mother plant”. There was a pressing and constant requirement of machine repairs and spares, as well as plywood handling and processing equipment.

As a corollary to this challenge the Ferro Foundries factory was born in 1974, headed by Moiz’s cousin, Noman, and his son Haider Khorakiwala.

Under the brand ‘Ferro Tiger’, Ferro Foundries began manufacturing machinery spares, glue spreaders, DD saws, pneumatic veneer clippers and presses – which the factory does to this day. Additionally, it manufactures and exports hydraulic pallet trucks, scissor lifts, slim lifts, mobile elevating platforms, dock levellers and many other custom-designed special purpose equipment.

Established in 1987, Pyramid Timber Associates manufactures wooden doors and door frames, decorative veneer, finger-jointed boards, wall panelling, sawn wood and exotic tabletops. It is run by Shabbir’s uncle, Mohammadi, and his sons, Ali Asghar Hussain and Hussain Vagh. (Look up the July-Aug 2018 edition of WoodNews for more information on Pyramid Timber).

The Coimbatore, Bengaluru and Hyderabad lines of the Vagh family run the trading houses, Industrial Engineering Stores and Ahmedally, which supply industrial hardware and cutting tools, precision measuring and inspection instruments, material handling equipment and castor wheels, adhesives, sealants and abrasives.

The Vagh Group recently added Mysuru-based Bram Woodcrafting Studio to its portfolio in a joint venture. Led by French master craftsman Bram Rouws, the factory specialises in designing, prototyping and manufacturing high-quality, bespoke furniture from solid wood.

It also manufactures modular wooden houses and window frames. (Look up the Nov-Dec 2018 edition of WoodNews for more information on Bram Woodcrafting Studio).

It is these resources that MAS Furniture and the Vagh Group share and harness to create synergies that have led them from being tagged manufacturers in a “small town” to creating a business that spans several verticals, materials, technologies and global markets.

Game-changer in the flat-pack, ready-to-assemble furniture segment: seating components (L) ready for despatch. The best-selling Peacock moulded ply chairs (R).

Peacock chair

Abuli and his brother Abbas Vagh branched out to establish Decorative Laminates, manufacturing paper overlay, non-slip and melamine-faced plywood and melamine-faced substrates. His design and production of moulded plywood chairs and furniture became a game-changer in the flat-pack, ready-to-assemble (RTA) furniture segment.

Beginning in 1980, the Peacock brand of moulded ply chairs earned him profits and recognition in the domestic and as well as international markets. It continues to be a favourite in many homes and offices across India. The company also met with considerable success in manufacturing TV cabinets.

“The Peacock chair was the first flat-packed, ready-to-assemble, stackable chair in India,” Abuli recalls. “Because of its knock-down packaging, it reduced damage during transhipment and brought immense ease of assembly. The Peacock chair also gave enormous options to designers in terms of flexibility and performance,” he adds with pride.

The success of the moulded ply chair led the family to diversify into manufacturing of bent ply furniture components and finished products under the brand name Plymould in 1982.

This specialised division manufactures products from veneers peeled from trees which are 100% plantation grown and sustainably managed. The timber species of choice are Melia Dubia, Silver Oak and Rubber wood.

The veneer components are hot-pressed under high pressure in moulds and bonded with a specially formulated, low formaldehyde, highly cross-linked, thermo-setting adhesive manufactured in-house at their Hunsur plywood plant.

“We started the factory with hand-cranked screw presses, forming the bent ply shapes by cold pressing the veneers between hand-shaped teakwood moulds. With the passage of time and pressure on increasing the production capacity we had to modernise and innovate,” says Abuli.

The Ferro Tiger factory was a great support, designing and manufacturing 30 hydraulic presses with heated platens to meet demand. Plymould today has mastered the use of multiple technologies to produce bent ply products.

Depending on customer needs, it adopts high-frequency or electric conduction heating to manufacture the products. They have a library of close to 600 wooden and metal moulds and over 1,500 profile patterns which is Plymould’s inherent strength.

Bent ply components like chair seats, backs, shells, armrests, legs, etc. are supplied to the likes of Featherlite, Stanley, Godrej, Wipro, Hayworth, Amardeep, Ambar and the House of Furniture, Neelkamal and Spacewood, to name a few. Volvo and Marco Polo buses in India also use these components for passenger seating.

Wrigley’s gum

“In the 1990s furniture began to be sold in showrooms as products – before that it was usually made on-site by groups of carpenters,” Abuli tells me. MAS Furniture was established in the year 1984, initially operating from a shed that formerly hosted the Mysuru Maharaja’s goushala (cattle pen).

Another feather in its cap was added when the company bagged an order to manufacture customised production trays for Chicago-based Wrigley’s chewing gum factory in Bengaluru. It went on to supply these trays to Wrigley’s factories in the US, China and Kenya.

“The trick was to use natural, food grade veneer that would not contaminate or stain the edible product. We made these trays with Silver Oak and our in-house resin for adhesive. This won the US company’s trust after extensive trials,” Abuli remembers.

MAS Furniture now manufactures all its products in RTA format, be it chairs and tables, beds or wardrobes. Most products are manufactured from its in-house Hunsply, even for kitchens, wardrobes, side tables, beds, etc. Particle board and MDF are used only if the customer demands them. The company also exports its products to the US, West Asia and Iraq.

Automation switch

By the year 2004 Shabbir, a trained engineer, had completed his Master’s degree in Wood Science and Forest Products in the US. He had followed it up with a 4-year-long stint as a plant manager at a furniture factory in Chicago.

It was here that he was exposed to CNC machines and automation. His learnings from the Chicago stint? “Only discipline in manufacturing and efficiency in production can make you cost-competitive,” he emphasises.

MAS Furniture was a manual workshop then with 30-odd carpenters. That was when the company introduced Felder’s first machines in India – table saws, band saws and spindle moulders – that are still in service in the Mysuru factory.

When a contract came for curved tables for a Bengaluru college, Abuli and Shabbir picked up a Weeke (Homag) CNC edge bander and the Venture2 drilling and routing machining centre. The father-son duo credits (the late) ‘Ramu’ Ramakrishnan with being a “great support” in this switch to automation.

Infosys breakthrough

It was in the year 2006 that Infosys was planning its biggest corporate training centre on its Mysuru campus. Shabbir proposed that MAS Furniture be awarded a contract to furnish 1,000 rooms of the hostels that the IT major was setting up.

Armed with his confidence as an OEM to several renowned companies, Shabbir made a mock-up on the campus and was able to convince the Infosys top-brass – including its Founder Narayana Murthy and Mohandas Pai – that he had the expertise to execute such a project.

Shabbir remembers that Infosys wrote a cheque for ₹2 crore as advance, to enable MAS Furniture to equip itself with the machinery and materials required for the project. The architect, Hafeez Contractor, had specified the use of polished veneer furniture.

“Like children in a candy shop, we went on a buying spree – CNC milling centres, edge banders, multi-boring machines, a six-axes Bacci router and a Cefla spray coating system,” recalls Shabbir. “By the year 2009, we ended up doing 5,800 hostel rooms for Infosys across India, including doors and door frames!” he exclaims.

Drum roll

Ever since, MAS Furniture hasn’t looked back. It has collaborated with several real estate developers to furnish star resorts and hotels across India, Europe, the US, West Asia and the Maldives. Among its many collaborators are the Panchsheel and Brigade Groups.

MAS Furniture counts Amari, Novotel, JW Marriott, Ritz Carlton, Oakwood, Ibis and Holiday Inn as its clients in India and the US. The company’s reputation has also resulted in soft furnishing projects for hospitals and high-end spas in India, the US, Europe and West Asia.

A separate vertical within the company that has furnished more than 850 showrooms for automobile giants, including Mercedes Benz, Tata Motors, KIA Motors, Hyundai, Ford and Ather. Another vertical handles furniture fitouts and components to restaurants and fast-food chains like Dominos, Popeyes, Dunkin and MacDonald’s across India.

Through a strategic tie-up, MAS Furniture has supplied finished wooden and bent ply seating components for over 25,000 auditorium seats to a US-based company, Theatre Solutions Inc.

Through this collaboration it has supplied to over 60-odd auditorium projects in the US, notably the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles (famous for hosting the Oscar Awards); 2,000 seats in the Kauffman Center for Performing Arts in Kansas; at the Capitol Hill visitor centre; and the White House in Washington DC.

The company also manufactured some wooden storage boxes in Pine for IKEA for a few years. “The process of onboarding and manufacturing was a tremendous learning phase for us,” says Shabbir, who has much respect for the Swedish company’s business ethics and role as a knowledge-sharing partner.

Shabbir classifies his business in this manner: hospitality projects get top billing, followed by bent ply seating components and automobile retail spaces. Next come hospitals and spas (soft furnishings) and the doors market. In the residential sector he sees high-end kitchens as a burgeoning segment; followed by seating, storage and cafeteria spaces in educational institutions.

Factory ecosystem

Abuli and Shabbir classify their factory as one that can undertake highly customised, batch-1 production, and yet is flexible to execute orders of varying requirements and sizes.

“We have intentionally organised each shop floor in the factory in cells that are flexible – and we have had many occasions where we have comfortably altered configurations to meet our requirements,” Shabbir says.

Almost the entire ecosystem has been built on machinery from Homag, keeping in mind the machines’ roles, their maintenance and the training required for it. “We are quite thankful to Homag for the good guidance we got and their tremendous support system,” Shabbir says.

When the machines started trickling into the factory over the years, the 30 carpenters who have been with MAS Furniture since its inception were visibly upset at the thought of being rendered redundant. All of them were successfully trained by Homag.

“These carpenters are now supervisors on the shop floor. They have been a part of our business family,” Shabbir admits unabashedly. “I can say 50% of our success has been on account of the machines, the remaining 50% is because of our staff.”

Over time MAS Furniture has acquired expertise and built capacities in a wide range of materials required for their multifaceted projects, including wood, veneer, plywood, bent ply, laminates, marble, stone, Corian, acrylic surfaces, aluminium and even steel. This has now become the company’s USP in being able to win projects.

Timber tribulations

Shabbir calls a typical Indian furniture consumer “teako-centric”, and with a heavy bias towards plywood. However, with depleting stocks of teak within the country, and restricted supply of hardwoods, he stresses that scientifically harvested softwood species from certified plantations and forests are the answer to India’s demand for solid timber furniture.

MAS Furniture largely uses European Beech (good density and staining), Red and White Oak (good grains) and American Ash, depending on the applications of the furniture it manufactures.

Canadian and European soft woods are used extensively for sofa framing, styles and rails of door shutters and door frames, which are generally finger-jointed or edge-glued.

Shabbir doffs his hat to organisations such as the American Hardwood Export Council and Canadian Wood who he says are educating architects, interior designers and furniture manufacturers about the sustainability of wood as a construction and furniture making material.

“These organisations are not selling products. They are making specifiers aware of the inherent qualities of timber and the long-term benefits to reducing green-house gas emissions,” he avers, adding: “Their support to furniture manufacturers has also been very helpful.”

India should aim to become self-sufficient in meeting its biomass needs. The forest department can do that by shedding its watch-and-ward attitude and promote forest and plantation species for the furniture and construction sectors, Shabbir feels.

Seating in the Kauffman Center for Performing Arts in Kansas (L). Interiors in a resort project in the Maldives (R).

Future of manufacturing

Choosing machines and materials is always at the centre of consideration in any woodworking business. The application, role and capacity of any machinery – and its cost – is at the root of decision making.

But mapping those capacities to a community of machines, their gelling with the software, and communicating with each other for synchronised and efficient production takes precedence for Shabbir.

Since the advent of software as a service, it has become a recurring cost. He feels that a good woodworking factory is a healthy mix of CNC hardware, enabling software and special purpose machines.

“Of course, I cannot over-emphasise the importance of strong traditional woodworking knowledge and skills,” Shabbir signs off before guiding me through the expansive display in the showroom on the factory premises.

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