News

Franco Bulian and Andrea Giavon.

Catas reaches an important milestone this year, being the fifty year of activity.

It was in fact in 1969 when the Chamber of Commerce of Udine decided to set up our laboratory.

But in these brief notes we certainly do not want to remember the story of Catas that will be narrated by its direct witnesses and in various episodes, within an important space on our website.

The anniversary really pushed us to look forward giving even more strength to our activities by organizing a series of initiatives that will accompany us throughout the whole year. A new logo, an update of our website (with the space dedicated to our history), a rich program of courses & seminars presented in this newsletter, the inauguration of the new laboratory after the summer and some other surprises we do not want to reveal immediately…

50 years of tests and 30 of CATAS News.
The test activity in these fifty years has naturally grown in the two characteristic dimensions of the "anthropos", both in the horizontal one (enlarging the number of technical aspects involved) and in the vertical one (deepening the contents with increasing specialization) passing and continuing from the simple solid content determination of the adhesives to the complexity of an XRF spectroscopy analysis adding also everything in between, of course, 50 years of experience!

The test activity of CATAS has generated in recent years a double service of undoubted value for the furniture industry: the first is the providing of objective technical data on the products of the supply chain (from raw materials to finished products), the second is the development of a deep technical knowledge and its sharing without any limitation or border reaching, we are sure, important positive effects on the whole sector.

In addition to the personal data of fifty years of activity, Catas also reaches another significant milestone: thirty years of the publication of our newsletter.

In fact, it was 1989 when the first Catas News printed in black and white on four A4 pages appeared. The appreciation of our customers towards the technical news concerning the world of wood and furniture has made this initiative grow, which first became a true newsletter printed in color with cover and images accompanying the various articles (1996) and then, in more recent years (2017), it has been transformed into a monthly newsletter prepared and sent using modern IT tools.

All the articles in our newsletters are written by the Catas technicians being the same people who daily carry out the tests and who also follow the standardization evolution of our industry. Our newsletter was born as a tool for a continuous dialogue with all those who gravitate around the world of wood and furniture, and we still desired it could be a useful tool for their daily activities, perhaps urging new ideas, new contacts and collaborations for the continuous improvement of this important production sector.

Important was the generalization process which, starting from specific cases, was able to gather some technical aspects (defects, construction details, operative solutions, etc.), sharing them with everyone in order to improve the performance or, in other words, the quality of the wood and furniture products.

Remarkable, unique at the beginning, and fundamental for the sector was (and still is) the metabolization and presentation (not simplification!) of the technical standards concerning the furnishing supply chain. This was possible above all because of these documents we have been protagonists for almost 40 years. And the furniture sector has always appreciated this effort of information and explanation while changing the motivations and approaches, but always with the same need for knowledge, more or less manifest. Over the years, styles of writing, storytelling and observation points on technical aspects have certainly changed too. These will surely change again in the normal evolution of the systems considering the antropos above. What must remain, and of which we already have evidence, is the curiosity and the courage that brings us, in front of the appearance of lightning in the sky, to try to understand what is generated by, telling it and then explaining it to everyone.

The goal of the 30 years of news leads us first led us to thank those who follow us considering the help we are sometimes given through useful suggestions, but the occasion is also significant to address a sincere thanks to all the colleagues who, despite the difficulty of "writing" (almost all we feel unprepared and inadequate in this exercise) have written and continue to do so with passion and dedication, giving continuity to what the Catas really wants to be and represent within this important industrial sector.