CEBU CITY, July 16 Asia Pulse – An internationally acclaimed Cebuano furniture designer is planning to set up a design academy in the next two or three years.<\/p>\n
Kenneth Cobonpue, who owns and manages Interior Crafts of the Island Inc., a family-owned furniture design and manufacturing company, said the design academy would be a postgraduate school for two years.
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\n He said he may have to tap foreign funding institutions or establish international partnerships to ensure the school’s sustainability.<\/p>\n
“But if things run efficiently the way I want it to, I’m gonna do it myself,” he added.<\/p>\n
Cobonpue said he “strongly believes” in the academe to produce new and creative ideas from students.<\/p>\n
Designing is seen to be an edge of the Philippine furniture industry above its competitors.<\/p>\n
Due to the volatility of the local currency and stiff competition in the global market, he said the Filipinos well-renowned craftsmanship is what the industry is banking on to stay competitive.<\/p>\n
However, he said finding and retaining hot-shot designers have now become a great challenge for industry players as most designers leave the country for high paying jobs abroad.<\/p>\n
“We need to train them, cultivate them because we don’t have schools for furniture design,” he said.<\/p>\n
Cobonpue, who is also an industrial design lecturer at the University of the Philippines-Cebu College, foresees the industry’s potential to stimulate the minds of students enrolled in architecture, fine arts and industrial design.<\/p>\n
Cobonpue spoke in the recent furniture export industry forum conducted by the Cebu Furniture Industries Foundation Inc. (CFIF) together with the University of San Carlos (USC), CIDA Pearl 2 and the German Development Service.<\/p>\n
In his speech titled “From OEM to Branding: Strategic Move from Survival to Domination,” Cobonpue demonstrated how companies can adopt several strategies to slowly shift to high-value design manufacturing and branding.<\/p>\n
“There’s a need to brand individually. If we market it solely as a Philippines brand, it won’t work,” he said.<\/p>\n
He said a single Philippine brand does not seem to appeal to the local market and will be regarded with even less interest by the highly critical American and European markets.<\/p>\n
(PNA)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CEBU CITY, July 16 Asia Pulse – An internationally acclaimed Cebuano furniture designer is planning to set up a design academy in the next two or three years. Kenneth Cobonpue, who owns and manages Interior Crafts of the Island Inc., a family-owned furniture design and manufacturing company, said the design academy would be a postgraduate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-furniture-indonesia-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4431\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}