Celebrating 10 years of growth - MOKO Interior’s 10th Anniversary
2024 marks a significant milestone for MOKO Interior, as we celebrate our 10th anniversary of elevating interiors with natural art.
Over the past decade we grew from a small, local brand to one that is present and sought-out internationally in both residential and commercial projects of the highest quality.
Today we look back and take a moment to reflect on our successes, challenges, mistakes, and the many-many lessons we learned along the way.
The story of MOKO Interior started in 2014, when the company was officially founded, but the true spark, the ’MOKO idea’ came even a few years prior to that…
Meet Zsolt, the lead designer behind MOKO Interior’s artistic veneer feature walls.
Zsolt was born in 1968 in Hungary. He studied interior design at the Moholy-Nagy University of Arts (MOME) and graduated in 1993. Since then he has created numerous exclusive spaces for banks, luxury retail stores, chain stores, hotels, restaurants and other private individuals as well. While designing interiors with great zeal, he also fervently studies new materials and shapes in order to to make indoor spaces the most exciting possible.
Since then he has personally devised over a thousand(!) commercial venues, like stores, offices, and hundreds of scenic designs. His works have won an abundance of awards and accolades. A slave to his genius and ambitions, Zsolt is a well-established professional with a huge footprint in his home, Hungary.
After more than 20 years of experience, Zsolt launched his own brand onto the international market in 2014.
The unique MOKO Interior wooden feature walls are designed and manufactured with so much care and artistry that keeping them hidden locally was never really an option.
MOKO Interior isn’t just Zsolt’s designer mind made manifest.
It’s also a statement about design in-general.
He also shared one of his most important inspiration: being out on the water, either on his SUP or his sailboat.
Zsolt also has a soft-spot for natural formations. Motifs that are present all-around in nature.
Most definitely a determining thought, when developing the designs for MOKO.
THE EARLY YEARS OF MOKO:
In our first years we quickly got some big clients and worked on some challenging and exciting projects, like the Golden Suite for Spagna Royal, or the VIP lounge in Groupama’s football stadium.
Our team was small, but hard working and dedicated every step of the way. Because of this, we fell into a whirlpool of projects, which put certain brand development tasks in the background momentarily, just so we can complete our projects with the smoothness and professionalism we represent.
But thanks to our product quality and work ethic, we were able to build good relationships with our clients / partners, even keeping contact with some of them to this very day.
MOKO was immediately cherished locally both by the interior design cosmos, but also with several design magazines, like DesignMilk, WoodWorking Network, Frame Magazine, Elle Decor India, or Dornob writing articles about MOKO’s novel handcrafted 3d feature walls.
In the coming years we started to focus more on our company values, and our brand identity.
For this, we had to identify and develop our main values:
📍 We had an immediate understanding on using only industry-best materials, which brought us to Alpi veneer’s doorstep, who since then has been our primary source of raw materials.
📍 Being sustainable, minimizing our carbon footprint was an immediate cornerstone for us.
📍 Aside from this, we also decided that accessibility would be our third aspect we would like to bolster.
This meant developing mounting methods, which clients’ technicians abroad could not only easily understand, but also follow to the letter. This was a must-have, as we wouldn’t have been able to go and mount the panels ourselves, sometimes in several different countries at once.
And since we were already there, we went one step further and also made it also very easy to remove them, in case the client would like to relocate them within, or outside their original venue, which wasn’t that big of a breakthrough in case of commercial projects, but our residential clients were very happy due to the added flexibility.
After a few years MOKO found its footing on the international market. Being present in numerous esteemed projects, like taking part in the complete refurbishing of Glasgow’s Strathclyde University’s Royal College Building, or delivering two gigantic feature walls to the renovated historic Villa Harrah in Tahoe (Where back in the day the one and only Frank Sinatra would visit regularly to relax with other Rat Pack members, like Sammy Davis Jr.)
As a high-end artistic product, MOKO was never a mainline commodity, but we had more than enough projects to keep our ambitions busy, and in the meantime we developed great relationships with industry-best teams, like Solanna Design.
We moved away a bit from residential projects, and put our focus more-so on commercial ones. This was due to the increase in demand, and the aggressively rising prices of both veneer materials, and also our production method, which was being fine-tuned tirelessly. Understandably residential projects sometimes couldn’t allocate enough budget for these type of costs.
We made the unfortunate mistake (But psst! don’t tell anyone) - of trying to combat this with unique offers a few times, which gave us a HUGE lesson, which was that the very moment you devalue your product to any degree, the client will also immediately misunderstand it, undervalue it.
In our case, this meant they didn’t respect the panels as much. They were moved into unforgiving spaces (where 8+ hours of daily direct sunlight would bleach the panels), or against our explicit warnings, using cleaning agents on them, then be horrified with the resulting servicing costs.
These were awful experiences not only because it created a divide between the customer and us, but also because our babies were mishandled. Every artist’s worst nightmare, isn’t it?
At least we learned our lesson, once and for all.
In the following years we made great strides with taking part in multiple international design fairs, like ISE Amsterdam, creating a joint showroom in Vancouver with Code, The Downtown Exhibition (Dubai), or the famed Salone Del Mobile, Milano. We received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback, which now made it unquestionable to us that we needed to push MOKO even further.
COVID-19 and the Pandemic
Next on the agenda was the development of our broader marketing strategy.
When the pandemic hit, and everything shut down, we had ample time to regroup, brainstorm, and plan.
We identified a couple key areas we wanted to improve upon, most notably our website and social media presence, which pretty much got the shaft, while we were busy delivering all our orders. Even though our platforms were filled to the brink with gorgeous content and were already perfectly functional, we felt that it didn’t quite capture the level of artistry and professionalism, that MOKO, the brand represented. We also wanted to make certain elements of planning MOKO walls more accessible to our clients.
Reworking these platforms was definitely a big task. Not only did we want to synchronize our looks with our product’s level of quality, but since we were already there, we, again, took another step further and started to finalize our brand book. What exactly are “MOKO colours”, what fonts we use, how much can the logo change visually, all of that. It was grueling to go throught every aspect of the brand, but luckily for most of them, we already had somewhat of a clear idea about how we’d like to limit our looks, to keep them uniform.
The first major development was our ‘Pick Your Pattern’ feature on our website, which let users
Select their preferred panel motif out of our selection of 12
A layout (like 2x3, or 5x5)
And then presented to them the selected wall visually, on which they can customize the walls with just a few clicks.
This was a major step towards our clients, especially due to how many options our walls give in terms of customization. Didn’t have to wait long until positive feedback started to pour in for our small feature. Prior to this, clients had to wait for our visualizations, and then decide on a yes or no answer, effectively shortening ordering processes for clients, who could often be in a hurry due to their project’s schedule.
Now, they could make first contact with us with an already planned wall composition, request a price, and move through planning communications much faster.
IN RECENT YEARS
In these last few years we were vigilant in not only delivering projects full-throttle, but also measuring, administrating and analyzing all of our efforts, incoming queries, communications, etc. Developing a firm’s administrative aspects wasn’t the most fun we ever had, but the resulting crystallized information we were able to acquire was nothing short of amazing. We also discovered that there was a market with which we only briefly brushed shoulders with previously, but we never really engaged with it on a higher level, even thought we received many positive feedbacks.
That market was the United Arab Emirates. On a previous trade exhibition many expressed their interest in MOKO, we even took part in one of Zaha Hadid’s projects, which was sadly cut short due to her passing. May she rest in peace, knowing how much she gave to the industry during her incredible carreer.
None the less, we started market researching and planning our approaching return to the Emirates, where commercial projects now are on a meteoric rise.
Since then, we had multiple meetings, made invaluable connections, and jumped head-first into our newest venture!
2024
2024 had an intense start.
After a long road of planning, and designing, we finally launched our second product line since the company’s birth: our Artistic Wall Composition Series.
Kicking-off with 4 distinct, pre-composed, out-of-the-box feature walls, focusing on our KALAHARI and VOLGA motifs, we added Macassar Ebony to their list of available veneer options to further push the envelope on these compositions’ quality, even-though this introduced a level of scarcity regarding the special veneer types used.
- and very soon, we debuted our new Artistic Wall Compositions with several residential projects.
Furthermore, we also launched a special selection of 3 other feature walls, which we call: Exclusive Art Series
All three walls are covered with either a special kind of never-before-seen, limited veneer (Yes. Believe it or not, these are engineered, but none-the-less veneer walls).
- Or in case of our “Doubtless” wall composition, we cover the entire veneer wall in pure gold, providing truly special options for those select few, who only want the most iconic elements for themselves.
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..
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And THIS is where our 10th Anniversary hit us. We have a lot of milestones behind our backs, we have had the pleasure of working with some very special clients and on some equally exciting projects.
- but to be honest, the way we see it…
We’re just getting started. ;)
Thank You all, for the past 10 wonderful years! Without you, we couldn’t be doing what we love best:
*Transforming spaces into true venues of NATURAL art.*
Here’s to 10 more amazing years of MOKO! 🥃
Stay tuned for more news!
- The MOKO Interior team
