Ray Allegrezza — Furniture Today,
KAYSERI, Turkey — While the Istikbal brand may be the face familiar to American retailers,
the company’s Turkish parent, Boydak Holdings, is the heart and soul.
Founded 50 years ago in this city as a local furniture maker, Boydak Holdings has evolved into one of Turkey’s foremost business entities, a vertically integrated manufacturing, retailing and financial enterprise.
Excluding Anadolu Finans, the commercial bank it operates, Boydak’s revenues this year are expected to hit the equivalent of US$1.8 billion. With more than 12,000 employees, it is Turkey’s largest maker of mattresses, furniture, mattress ticking, textiles and communication and energy cables.
Boydak’s furniture operations are formidable: It has 10 million square feet of manufacturing facilities in 16 factories on three campuses, pumping out case goods, upholstery, juvenile furniture, mattresses and ticking, fabric, metal components such as mattress springs and upholstery frames, textiles and foam in staggering quantities.
“To explain how large this entity is, the foam plant pours enough foam to supply all of Turkey,” said Mehmet Bilici, president of Sunset International Trading, Boydak’s U.S. distribution arm. “Another example is Boydak Textile, which was founded in 2000 and produces 18 million meters of ticking. It sells to large firms such as Culp, which distributes the ticking to manufacturers including Serta, Simmons, Spring Air and Sealy.”
Boydak Holdings and its various operations export products to more than 72 countries. In furniture, its three major brands include Istikbal, Bellona and Mondi. It has a full line of rugs and accessories that are sold under the Deco brand and it sells a full assortment of leather furniture, sourced in Asia, under the Hukla brand.
Murat Bozdag, Boydak’s general manager, describes the manufacturing clout in numbers: “We make 7,000 sofas a day, 20,000 square meters of panel furniture each day, 6,000 mattresses a day, more than 3,500 foundations a day and make about 10,000 pieces of textiles each day.”
Panel furniture is his term for flat-pack or ready to assemble, and 20,000 square meters, or about 200,000 square feet, is quite a lot.
Last year, the furniture group produced export shipments valued at $65 million. It says it is on target to hit $75 million this year, $100 million in 2014 and $300 million by 2017.
Smiling, Bozdag says, “And by the way, did I mention our retail stores?”
As with its manufacturing, Boydak Holdings does retail on a grand scale. It operates some 2,000 stores in Turkey, including 1,200 under the Istikbal banner and 800 Bellona stores.
Most of the stores average about 17,000 square feet, but the company also operates a number of larger-format stores called Home Concept By Istikbal. They average 50,000 square feet and also sell kitchen cabinets and countertops — made, of course, by a Boydak Holdings division, Istikbal Regain Kitchen and Bath. A few of the stores are as large as 100,000 square feet.
The company’s retail presence extends well beyond Turkey, with Istikbal stores in such countries as Sweden, Greece, Cyprus and Egypt. It also has a single 28,000-square-foot Istikbal store in the United States, in Clifton, N.J.
Istikbal also is testing in-store galleries with some Top 100 U.S. stores, including Miami Gardens, Fla.-based El Dorado.
Even so, Boydak maintains that its primary objective is to continue to enhance and grow its business in Turkey and neighboring areas.
“We are the market leader in Turkey, the No. 1 mattress supplier to Europe and the No. 2 global supplier of ticking,” said Bozdag. “And with a plan to add 300 new stores in Turkey, we think we have a full plate in front of us.”
