Elan founder Boris Tosic turns his talents to furniture with Skupa line

Joinery master Boris Tosic is marrying design talent with local manufacture for his new furniture line, Skupa – and you don’t have to wait months for it.

Part of the new Skupa furniture range

If you’ve tried to improve your home environment with some new imported furniture in the past 12 months, chances are you’re still waiting for it to arrive. Lead times for European designed and manufactured furniture have blown out from 12 weeks – once the industry standard – to six months, to a year, to “indefinite” in some cases.

It’s a frustrating problem for consumers and retailers alike. Material shortages and increased freight costs have meant retailers that specialise in imported furniture aren’t able to speedily satisfy customer demand, and people are only prepared to wait so long for items to sit on before they start to look for something that can get their hands on sooner.

Enter Skupa, a new line of furniture designed and manufactured by Boris Tosic and his joinery company Elan. “It’s all based on a short lead time,” says Tosic. “Delivery is four to six weeks, but I could even do some things in one to two weeks.”

Boris Tosic

Skupa is stocked nationally by Living Edge and the company’s chief executive, Aidan Mawhinney, says the shorter lead times Skupa could offer was a feature in deciding to represent the new brand. “Long lead times factor into a customer’s decision-making because people just won’t wait that long … so it’s nice to know there is something local that we can rely on to satisfy the retail residential market, but also the contract market as well.”

With his Elan business, Tosic has created fitouts for homes, luxury stores and high-end offices under the direction of some of Australia’s leading architects and designers. But it was while working on his own house – a former warehouse in Sydney’s Paddington featured in WISH last year – that he hit upon the idea of creating his own line of furniture.

“Basically, while I was renovating my house there were certain pieces of furniture that I just couldn’t find and so I decided to make them myself,” he recalls. “I’m a maker and I really like the process of teasing out solutions and making things possible.”

Tosic is an avid collector of design and says the new brand is a collaboration with some of the design talent he has met over the years. The word “skupa”, he says, means “together” in his native Croatian. “I can’t do everything on my own, and I didn’t want to embark on being a designer and step on other people’s toes, but with the right design people and my expertise, it’s like an open discussion with friends.”

Items from the Skupa range

The first Skupa collection, which includes dining tables, bench seating, desks, coffee tables, day beds, shelving units and accessories, is made from sustainably sourced solid oak and walnut and is produced in Elan’s workshop in Sydney. Everything in the Skupa range can be broken down into components and flat-packed to make it easier to transport and install in difficult to access apartment buildings and houses. A second Skupa collection is already in the works, and Tosic says he would like to exhibit the brand at Salone del Mobile in Milan one year.

Living Edge also became the distributor of another Australian furniture brand this year – Laker, designed by David Caon and Henry Wilson. The move into having more Australian-made products, according to Mawhinney, is a natural evolution that allows Living Edge to be less reliant on international supply chains. “One thing we have always said is that we are not going to represent Australian brands just for the sake of it. The brand really needs to sit within the Living Edge portfolio as a global brand.”

“Manufacturing is local and is all based on short lead times,” says Tosic. “But I can also make this in Croatia, where I have a workshop if I need [to be able to supply the European market quickly]. The idea is definitely to make it an international brand.”