Chief Marketing Officer / Singapore / Southeast Asia
Three decisions that cost revenue in their first year
- Company revenue
- VND2,140bn
- 2025; engineered timber flooring and wall panels
- Own-brand share of sales
- 24%
- Mocvanh-branded revenue of VND520 billion in 2025
- Mapped smallholder plots
- 1,180
- Acacia core supply for every board sent to the EU
Decisions & consequences
01Launching the own brand in Australia while our largest customer kept Europe
In late 2021 the board approved a plan to sell engineered floors under the Mocvanh name. Our largest private-label customer, a German importer, had bought VND471 billion of boards that year, 31 per cent of revenue, and sold them across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Our investor's director and our head of export sales wanted the brand launched in Europe, our largest market, at the main European flooring fair. Their forecast showed VND210 billion of brand revenue by the third year.
I recommended Australia first, followed by South Korea, with no Mocvanh sales in the importer's three markets before 2025. My forecast was lower, VND160 billion by the third year, and the European opportunity would wait. The alternative risked a customer able to move a third of our volume to another plant within two seasons. Our chief executive supported the sequence; the investor's director asked for his preference for Europe to be recorded in the minutes.
We gave the brand its own specifications: 190 and 240 millimetre widths and a three-millimetre wear layer, against the importer's 180 millimetres and 2.5 millimetres. I appointed four state distributors in Australia, launched in July 2022 and opened South Korea through one distributor in 2023.
Brand revenue reached VND38 billion in 2022, VND182 billion in 2023 and VND341 billion in 2024, ahead of the cautious forecast. The importer renewed for 2023 to 2025 and bought VND471 billion of boards in 2025, when Mocvanh-branded sales reached VND520 billion, 24 per cent of revenue.
The company now treats each private-label customer's markets as a planning boundary. What I would change is how the importer heard. We planned to tell its owner at the renewal meeting in late 2022. He learnt of the brand that spring through a mutual veneer supplier and asked for a 1.5 per cent price reduction at renewal, which we conceded at about VND7 billion a year. I would now tell such a customer in person before any public step.
Cutting the European range to the products we could trace to a plot
Late in 2023 our European customers began asking how we would support their due diligence under the EU deforestation regulation, then due to apply from the end of 2024. Our veneers were straightforward: European oak and North American ash came with documented origins. The plywood cores were not. They used plantation acacia and eucalyptus bought through about forty core suppliers, drawing on thousands of smallholders. Our sourcing director, Luu Quoc Thinh, estimated that two cooperatives could map their members' plots within a year. The other suppliers could not say when.
The decision was commercial as well as technical. Our head of export sales wanted to keep all 46 European products and continue sourcing broadly until the rule applied, arguing that competitors would do the same. Two private-label customers preferred the cheaper unmapped cores. I recommended that from April 2024 every product sold into the EU use cores from the two cooperatives only, which reduced the European range to 29 products and raised core costs by about six per cent.
We paid VND4.6 billion towards mapping 1,180 plots and cooperative record-keeping. I rewrote our European price lists, explained the change to each customer and published which products were available with a traceable core. Lost sales on the withdrawn products came to about VND64 billion in 2024.
In December 2024 the regulation's application was postponed by a year. Several competitors kept broader ranges, and one customer moved VND38 billion of 2025 orders elsewhere. We kept the restriction. By the end of 2025 every EU shipment carried plot-level data, and both new European brand distributors cited it when they signed.
Traceability is now part of our product specification. What I would do differently is the format. We built a detailed PDF dossier for each shipment, while customers' systems needed structured data they could load. Rebuilding it in 2025 cost VND1.9 billion. I should have asked three customers' compliance teams what they would actually use before we designed anything.
Keeping Vietnamese manufacture on the face of the European packaging
Our commitment to stay out of the German importer's markets ended in 2025, and we entered the Netherlands, Belgium and the Nordic countries through two distributors. The Dutch distributor, whose network covered roughly 300 flooring shops, proposed selling our range under a Dutch-sounding name, with "designed in Europe" on the box and Vietnam mentioned only in the required small print. Its managing director believed customers in those shops would pay ten to twelve per cent less for a floor they recognised as Asian.
Every shipment already carried our name, Vietnamese origin and plot-level timber data for the importer's due-diligence statement. Packaging that blurred origin would contradict the documents behind the product. Origin questions about wood panels from the region were also drawing closer attention in several import markets. Our chief executive agreed; our head of export sales thought I was giving away margin to make a point.
We kept the Mocvanh name and printed "Made in Vietnam, French oak veneer" on the face of each box and at the top of each product page. To give the distributors room, we set the 2025 ex-works price six per cent below its Australian equivalent and paid for installer demonstrations in eight Dutch and Belgian shops. The Dutch distributor took three of our five collections; the Nordic distributor took all five.
European brand sales were VND41 billion in 2025 against a plan of VND58 billion. In the first half of 2026 they reached VND37 billion, and the Dutch distributor added a fourth collection after its shops reported fewer pricing objections than it had expected.
Our brand guidelines now require country of manufacture and veneer origin on the front of all packaging. What I would do differently is the order of evidence. I argued the case inside a negotiation about names and price. I should have asked twenty Dutch dealers and installers what they assumed about Asian-made engineered floors before that meeting, so the discussion began with their answers rather than two opinions.