Since the early 1980s, KLW Wood Products, a subsidiary of the KLW Group, has been a leading manufacturer and supplier of door-sets and related products. The combination of 75 years of wood working experience in the timber industry and 20 years of market experience in supplying their door sets to various markets ,eans that the company has firmly established itself as the business that is opening doors for the future.
Doors are not only for keeping things in or out of a property. Irrespective of culture, country or creed, the door is the first example of how you welcome people. The door to a prison will hopefully be different to the door of a family home and then there are the influences that shape the style and aesthetics of the doors that can affect everything from the decoration, thickness, size and quality of the wood.
There are trends to consider, which shift given the fashionable influences affecting architecture at any one time and of course the needs and requirements of the doors will differ depending on whether it is for commercial or private usage.
International standards and a global reach
Having realised long ago that there is more to making a suitable door for a customer than just the manufacturing process, KLW Wood Products have been able to globalise their product offering and have been putting wood in holes across the globe, including countries such as Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Sri-Lanka, Cyprus, France, United Kingdom and the United States. The key, it would appear, is to offer as wide a selection as possible, to meet all the needs of a particular door. Their products include timber doors, flush doors, engineered doors, solid doors, project doors and even customised doors.
The production facility is located in Simpang Renggam, Johor, Malaysia where they have an aggregate gross production floor area of approximately 270,000sqft, with state of the art computerised equipment and machineries providing an average production capacity of 15,000 door-sets per month.
Since, as a business, KLW are an end-user themselves, they understand what the end-user wants most in their doors. Quality and durability have never been secondary at KLW; a door is made to last, with some of them being lucky enough to have the hands of many generations taking hold of their knobs and opening them up.
A proud company, KLW Wood Products have made this kind of long-lasting quality and design a mainstay of their offering and work very hard to provide the very best that is possible. Constantly improving and innovating their products, the doors of today will only be better tomorrow.
Making doors is one thing, but keeping them open for new opportunities is another and as a business and subsidiary, KLW Wood Products is always striving to accrue the latest and more influential accreditations and recently, as a business, they received the ISO 14001:2004 certification.
International ISO accreditation
This accreditation was partly earned by producing green-labelled, environmentally-friendly wooden door sets made from sustainable wood sources and recycled materials from agricultural waste as well as forestry waste. This added to the certificate ISO 9001:2008 certification KLW Wood Products that had already been received and makes both of the Group’s Malaysia and China operations under Dongguan Lebex Doors Co., Ltd. (“Dongguan Lebex”) certified under both the ISO 14001:2004 and the ISO 9001:2008 standards.
The ISO 14001:2004 standard provides organisations with a framework for an effective environmental management system that aims to achieve environmental goals like protecting the planet, preventing pollution and minimising the environmental impact of business operations.
KLW Wood Products was certified to be compliant with the standard based on an audit conducted on 31 March 2015. Managing Director of the Group, Mr Lee Boon Teck said, “We feel encouraged to receive this certification and this is an important seal of endorsement for our products. Environmental protection continues to remain a growing concern in our industry as well as in this world. More consumers, especially those in our key two markets, like Europe, are demanding products that come from companies with certified environmentally sustainable operations. We expect this trend to grow and are taking steps to restructure our business and readjust our operations in order to raise our standards in sustainable practices as a business and to become a more environmentally conscious organisation in all aspects of our operations. Our sustainability drive applies to new ventures that we might embark on in the future. In fact, one area we are now looking at is reusing and recycling our waste materials, like wood off cuts and sawdust that we generate from our daily operations. Ideally, we want to become a zero-waste operation.”
Apart from the ISO certifications, both KLW Wood Products and Dongguan Lebex also have a Chain-of Custody certification from the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which assures consumers that the wood originates from forests that are managed to meet the social, economic and ecological needs of present and future generations and that the flow of wood is tracked throughout the entire production process. This is in addition to the European Union Timber Regulation prohibiting the use of illegally harvested wood, which KLW already complies with in order to be a legal distributor of wood products into Europe. In addition to its manufacturing operations in Malaysia and China, KLW’s wholly-owned subsidiary in Singapore, KLW Joinery Pte Ltd, engaged mainly in the supply and installation of wooden doors to the Singapore market, also has a Singapore Green Label award for using renewable and sustainable materials for its products available for sale in the Singapore market.
Business is booming
There will always be a need for doors and this industry will continue to be profitable, regardless of the technological developments and creations of robotics. Like toilet paper and chairs, doors and door frames are an ever-present mainstay for humanity.
While able to offer other wood products, KLW Wood Products do not need to rely on the demand for their doors, only. With housing and business premises developments on the rise, their phones are ringing off the hook and the output numbers mentioned above are only set to rise.
So, it is reassuring that KLW Wood Products are so focussed on creating them out of waste materials to help protect the environment and to not make a drain on already stretched natural resources. It neatly illustrates the long term vision that this company has for themselves, having seen the need to proactively find a way to safeguard the environment through recycling, reconstituting and recreating.
When the doors open in this industry, KLW Wood Products is behind them.
