Barcelona Trip - Castellon (Factory and showroom tours) (April 9 - 11th)

This trip started off as an invitation from Fontile to visit the Porcelanosa showroom in Spain. I later decided to extend another week to the trip so that my wife, Janey and daughter, Katelyn can come and join me in Barcelona. The trip started off with a group of local interior designers meeting at the YVR airport for a late night flight. Robert and Jessica from Fontile were the fearless leaders of the pack and we kicked it off by having dinner at the Milestones restaurant where all 13 of us ordered salads. I guess this shouldn't come as a surprise since we are in Vancouver, or at least for the time being.

The group of designers on the tour

After a long travel day consisting of two flights and a 4 hour bus ride, we made it to Castellon, a small town, but head quarters of the Porcelanosa Group. I learnt that Porcelanosa started with humble beginnings as an orchard of all things. Then for some reason, they decided to give up the fruits and went for tiles instead. The small tile store that started more than 40 years ago has now grown into a group of companies totaling $1 billion (euro) in revenue. They have 8 brands which manufacture floor and wall tiles, kitchen cabinets, plumbing fixtures, and building system components to support their products. It's an amazing story to hear that the three partners (two brothers and another family) were able to grow to such success in a relatively short time. I learnt that the owners are still very much involved with the company and have an open door policy to any staff that wants to talk to them. In fact, they still operate out of the original, modest little red roofed building that was their original tile store. It's quite an interesting site to see this little building surrounded by huge, state of the art factories much larger than itself. It's a great testament to their humble beginnings and success. My interpretation of owners keeping the small building is that they don't forget where they came from. Currently, Porcelanosa Group employs 3000 people in this head quarter town and has showrooms worldwide.

Automated forklift, like a industrial sized Roomba

The first three days was spent touring the 8 factories/showrooms of Porcelanosa. All the factories were amazing to see. They were gigantic in size and can easily fit a couple of football fields in each one of them. The facilities are state of the art with fully automated production lines. There really isn't many factory workers because of the high tech machinery. Those that were there were people to control the quality and also R&D workers. The factory was so high-tech that they had their own automated forklifts which knows exactly where to go any any given time. They were even smart enough to stop if it senses someone in front of them, almost like your little Roomba vacumn but on a much bigger scale. The main Pocelanosa factory was built in 2001 and even back then, they had an eye towards energy efficiency. The mega-kilns where they fired the tiles produced the most excessive heat. So they designed the system to take the wasted heat from the kiln and converted it into extra energy for the rest of the building. In fact, this is a net positive building because they produce more than enough heat needed, so they actually re-sale back the excess to the city. Another interesting note is that because of the large facilities, each employee is assigned their personal bicycle to get around within the building, complete with personalized name plates. It's great efficiency for both the staff and the building.

Staff on bicycles for energy efficiency

Porelanosa's stocking center capable of 50,000 million tiles!

Their product showrooms were amazing! The spanish (and europeans in general) are so advanced in their design and craftsmanship that it was a lot of fun to look at. Some of the tile grout joints I saw were only a 1/16"! This is coming from North America where we typically only see 1/8" as the smallest. It blows my mind the precision they can achieve. The designs and presentations were so well executed, I only wished that we had such showroom resources in Vancouver. I truly felt like a kid on a shopping spree in my favourite toy store.

The Porcelanosa chefs showing their Paella creation

Not only were the showrooms and factories top notch, the Porcelanosa hosts were equally phenomenal. In fact, I think their head office looks for hosting skills as a hiring requirement. Every showroom we went to had a cafe where there is a full menu of coffee and alcohol beverages. In the whole factory complex, there were two full service restaurants dedicated to servicing guests only.

Here's a sample of our daily routine during the tour days:

1) Arrive at 1st showroom/factory

2) Morning coffee in the cafe

3) Tour and be wowed

4) Coffee break

5) Tour 2nd showroom and be wowed

6) Long lunches (less the siesta)

7) Coffee break & tour the 3rd showroom

8) Free time before dinner

9) 2 hour dinners

10) Sleep with absolutely full stomaches.

11) Repeat all of the above on the next day.

Iberico ham hanging at the restaurant

The typical meals consisted of at least 4 courses, a lot of meat and plenty of wine. The famous meat here is Iberico Jamon (Ham) which we had in every meal since we've been here. You can see it as a smoked pork leg that hangs at every restaurant or market. Its kind of ironic that this trip started out with all of us ordering salads at YVR. Yes, we designers could be a bit wishy-washy sometimes, but we didn't do the ordering, I swear!

Me and Jamon

From talking to our hosts, we learnt that the typical work day in Spain is quite long. People typically don't get off work until about 8pm and that explains why our dinners have typically been at 8:30 or 9:00 in the evening. By the time dinner is done, we usually don't get back to the hotel until about midnight. The locals still start their workday around 8 or 9am in the morning but I think their afternoon lunch breaks are longer than what we're used to in North America.