For many years, the company has been led by Gérad Poulet, who formed it in 1989. Initially, the operation started on a small scale.
Mr Poulet comments: ‘When you restore furniture, you have to add old wood or find a way to restore it. Therefore, we decided to make a range of products which enabled us to distress wood in various ways. This included both wood sorts which contain resin and oak. The time came when we noticed how demand was growing vastly and that in the short term we had to go to several bigger supply containers. That’s how we grew to where we are today, with the supply of products which can give an antiquated aspect to just about all wood sorts.’

Small production in Los Angeles
Easy Lab has now extended its operations beyond the borders of Europe and even has a small production plant in Los Angeles. There’s a practical reason for that: ‘The American market attracted us, but transport to and from there presented problems. The products overheated in the containers, so we decided to produce locally. This involves solely oxidising products for wood and the production itself is fairly modest.’

'For that matter, in Europe I work mainly with agents and they can be found in virtually every country, including the Benelux, Italy, Austria, Spain, and Germany and especially in the former Eastern Block. These people represent me locally and take care of demands from those countries.’

The colour narrative
We also wanted to know how Mr Poulet applies the narrative of the diverse colours.

‘Actually, all colours are possible,’ our interviewee clarifies. ‘We have all the possible products which users can then combine with each other for an extremely personalised end result as regards colour. We also give training sessions on our own site so that we can clearly illustrate the main oxidising processes to users. Once we’ve done that, you notice how you can obtain any desired result. Here I can add that I see a clear trend towards colours like honey, cognac clear, or pastels.’

Also active on the chalet market
We also wanted to know who the clients actually are. They appear to range from very big players such as Baltic Wood, Chêne de l’Est, or Bimbo to much smaller buyers. What’s remarkable is the rising demand from the chalet industry.

‘Newly distressed chalets are a real hype,’ says Mr Poulet with a laugh. ‘Firstly, those chalets are distressed on site, then we carry out our colour distressing, and after that you can’t distinguish a new chalet from an old one. We can even tackle the four sides of a chalet separately, depending on the orientation and there are even products for processing metal.’

‘The main advantage of these treatments is they go on and on and move with the times. Once the wood is treated, it develops naturally and you get genuine distressing with no pigments or colouring.’

Finally, we wanted to know how Easy Lab responds to the increasingly strict environmental requirements. Apparently, they don’t really have a problem in that respect.

Our interviewee stresses: ‘We don’t have any hazardous products and nothing is toxic. Obviously, you can’t really call these products ecological, but they do not cause any major problems to the environment and we don’t have to take any special precautions.