Fusteria Vidal Germans: they manufacture for half of Europe and online they did not exist

* Project data. The website goes live in September 2026: the visibility and quote request results will be published once there is enough history and the client confirms them.

The context

In Sant Fruitós de Bages there is a workshop that has spent half a century doing something very difficult and saying very little about it.

Fusteria Vidal Germans designs and manufactures the timber parts that hold up high-end sofas, armchairs and seating. It does not upholster or sell them: it makes the frame, the part machined to industrial precision that another brand then turns into the piece of furniture the end customer sees. They sit right in the middle of the chain, at the point where it is decided whether a three-thousand-euro sofa will last twenty years or creak by its second winter.

And they do two things at once, which is the unusual part. On the one hand they design the part together with the client: when a brand turns up with an idea, Vidal works out how it is actually manufactured — what joints, what geometry, how much timber can be saved without losing strength. On the other, they make it with CNC machines capable of parts most workshops cannot or will not take on.

Their clients confirm it better than any argument: they manufacture for companies making seating for auditoriums, theatres and cinemas; for international sofa and design furniture brands; for makers of hotel furniture and beauty salon furniture. People who do not buy on price, because an auditorium seat that fails is a very expensive problem.

Now the other half of the story. When a buyer from any of those brands looked Vidal up online, they found nothing like what we have just described. They found a website built on a template almost ten years old, with Catalan and Spanish mixed on the same page, no projects, no explanation of what they are capable of and not a single image of the factory at work. The only pages attracting any visits talked about reupholstering chairs in Barcelona: the positioning of a neighbourhood upholsterer, the exact opposite of their business. Even the links to their social media went to the network’s generic front page, not to their profile.

The summary is uncomfortable and it is the project’s real starting point: one of the best companies in its category in southern Europe was, in practice, invisible.

The challenge

When we analysed the market something came up that changed the conversation. It was not that Vidal was behind its competitors online: it is that the whole sector is asleep. Neither in Spain, nor France, nor Italy, nor Portugal is there a specialist of this kind that has worked seriously on its digital presence. The European benchmark in the sector, an Italian company with a positioning similar to the one we are proposing, does not show up either.

That turns a problem into an opportunity with an expiry date: the first company to build real authority in these four markets takes the category. But for that, several things had to be solved at once.

• Looking like what they are. A buyer of high-end furniture decides in three seconds whether they are looking at a workshop or an engineering company. And they decide by looking.
• Four markets, not one translated website. Each country searches with different words and buys in a different way. Translating the Spanish website is no use at all.
• Buyers are already asking artificial intelligence. A purchasing manager looking for a supplier today asks ChatGPT as well. When we tried it, not one answer mentioned Vidal, and in French the assistant simply invented names because it could find no reliable sources to cite.
• Turning visits into real opportunities. In this business a good enquiry is not a “hello, I am interested”: it is a buyer uploading a drawing and asking for a quote on a specific part.

The solution: first decide what they are, then say it

The temptation in a project like this is to start with the website. We started somewhere else: with a sentence.

Vidal presented itself as a fusteria, and a fusteria is a workshop that makes furniture. What they do is something else: engineering of the timber part for the high end. That change of positioning is not cosmetic. It justifies prices a workshop cannot ask for, it filters out the client who only looks at price and it is what makes an international buyer consider crossing a border to work with them.

1 · A brand worthy of the client they want

High-end buyers buy trust before price, and the first thing they assess is the brand. With a template logo and a template website, the message coming across was “local workshop”, however good the part was.

We have built a complete new identity — logo, colours, typography, graphic system and tone of voice — bringing together the two things that define the company: the precision of the machine and the nobility of the wood. The family name stays, because it is the legacy, and everything else changes. And it does not stop at the website: catalogue, data sheets, quote templates, sample packaging, workshop signage.

2 · One website per market, not one translated website

The new website goes live in five languages: Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian and Portuguese, with the technical section in English too. And each language is a real website, not a button that swaps the words.

This matters more than it seems. In France, for example, demand for this type of supplier is several times higher than in Spain and there is not one well-positioned specialist: the ground is clear. In Italy, by contrast, the category exists and has serious competitors, so entering means differentiating on co-design and technical difficulty. Portugal is above all a market to keep an eye on. Each website says what needs saying in each place.

3 · Pages by capability and pages by sector

Here is the least eye-catching part and the one that will sell the most. The website has its own page for each thing they know how to do — machining, turning, frames for upholstery, prototypes and co-design — and another for each sector they serve: high-end sofas, hotel and contract, auditorium seating, beauty and wellbeing, marine, retail.

The reason is simple. A buyer does not search for “fusteria”: they search for exactly the part or the capability they need, and they search in their own language. Each of those pages is a different way in. With a single “services” page you would only have one.

4 · Projects with data, not pretty photos

The projects are told with what a buyer wants to know: what the part was, what made it difficult, what production run it was made in and what was solved along the way. That is the content that convinces a professional and, as it happens, also the content artificial intelligence assistants cite, because it is concrete, verifiable data rather than adjectives.

5 · Getting AI to recommend them too

It is the most interesting lever in the project and the one almost nobody is working on. When you ask an artificial intelligence assistant about suppliers in this sector today, it answers with the little it can find published, and sometimes it makes it up.

The way to appear there is to publish technical content that can be cited: guides, tables, data, clear answers to specific questions, in all four languages. And to measure it every month, asking what a buyer would ask to see whether Vidal comes up or not. It is new work, it can be tracked with numbers and today it is wide open.

6 · Photography as proof, not as decoration

In a project that sells precision, the photograph is the argument. That is why we did not ask for “some photos of the factory”: we prepared a closed shot list of 54 images, each with its framing, its format and the exact slot on the website where it goes, grouped into six working sessions by area and time of day.

The approach is documentary: the factory genuinely at work, natural light, guards in place, the grain of the wood visible. No stock images. An industrial buyer tells a real factory from a bought photo library in two seconds, and that difference is worth more than any slogan.

7 · A form that asks for drawings

The website ends where the sale begins: a technical form where the buyer uploads their drawing and asks for a quote on a specific part. It completely changes the quality of what comes in. Instead of vague enquiries that have to be qualified over the phone, what arrives are requests carrying the information needed to answer.

Inside the website

It is twenty-four pages designed one by one, with their final text written before the design and not the other way round.

The home page does one thing: make clear in three seconds that this is a timber engineering company and not a workshop. The plant, a machine running, the technical office with a model on screen and a real part beside it. Below, the sectors, each with its card and its way in.

From there you go down to the capability pages, which explain what can be manufactured and within what limits; to the sector pages, written in each buyer’s language; to the projects; and to the technical knowledge area, where the real questions of whoever is about to order a part get answered. The company and the machine park have their own space, because in this business the machines are a sales argument, not a detail.

Where it stands

The website goes live this week, so talking about sales results would be making things up. What we can say is what exists today that did not exist in July.

There is a settled positioning: the company knows what it sells and to whom, and it says so identically in five languages. There is a complete new brand. There are twenty-four pages written and designed, with a page per capability and per sector in each market. There is a photography shot list so the factory is seen as it is. And there is a way of measuring whether this works: rankings in each market, quote requests received and in how many purchasing questions Vidal comes up when an artificial intelligence assistant is asked.

The first-year plan goes in phases and in a specific order: Spain and France first — France being the market with the most demand and the least competition — then Italy and Portugal. We will publish the data once there is some and the client confirms it.

And one thing that has already happened and is measured by no number: in the process, the company has for the first time set out what it knows how to do, for whom and why it gets chosen. That is useful inside and outside the website, including when a sales rep walks into a meeting.

What the project includes

Market study in four countriesPositioning and messagingComplete brand identityWebsite in five languagesA page per capability and per sectorTechnical copywritingProjects with dataIndustrial photography shot listQuote form with drawingsPresence in search engines and AI assistantsMonthly measurement

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