Luckily, They Haven’t Emigrated – Married Couple from Belgrade Only One in Serbia to Produce Wooden Lamps for Children with CE Quality Tag

If you are trying to imagine an average Serbian family micro-company which makes a certain product made of wood, it looks something like this: the dad, as the head of the family, is in charge of rougher works. In the case of the company we are going to describe – we’re talking cutting, shaping and hand-grinding of wood for the final product. The mom is the one who, before all that, draws or designs the desired product and then, when the shaped product arrives from the dad’s (rented) carpentry workshop to her desk in the house workshop in Zeleznik, she is the one who paints and coats the product, photographs it for the website and social networks, then packs it and sends it to the customers. She is also the one who usually communicates with the purchasers. On top of that, she takes care of their children, their school obligations, out of school activities, maintaining the house, doing the laundry, cooking. Everything that an average Serbian woman takes care of. However, she is also a woman entrepreneur, so, together with her husband, she takes care of the fiscal cash register, taxes, administration, buyers, online sales, standards, the CE tag, exports, materials, colors, promotion, fairs – everything she never dreamed she would have to take care of.

However, she is not sorry, nor is her husband, they admit for eKapija. Today, nearly four years after the company was founded, when they send their children to bed, while they are finishing the preparations for the new day, all they have to do is take a look at the product in front of them and they are proud of what they’ve created – an ecological, wooden, handmade night lamp, with a CE quality tag, which means that it is secure and safe for use. And they are the only ones in the country and the region to make such lamps, they say.

They are TwoN – Danka and Slaven Zivkovic, wood technology engineers, who, after years and years of work experience in big companies and even state companies or corporations – she as an interior designer, and he as a production organizer, considered leaving Serbia. With such a rich experience, they were receiving various job offers from Canada and Australia, but a problem arose whenever they mentioned to the potential employers that they didn’t have work visas. No employer, Slaven says, wanted to be bothered with that.

– Then Danka simply decided to turn over a new leaf, left the company she worked for at the time and, in the midst of the first coronavirus wave, opened her own – TwoN, named after our two sons, Nemanja and Niksa. At the moment, she was making decorative items made of wood, wall decorations, letters, handles, shelves. A month after the opening of the company, I realized that she would not be able to make it alone and then I also quit and joined her in this little creative workshop of ours – continues Slaven.

Considering that, at that moment, neither of them had a steady source of income, we naturally asked how they made a living at the time.

– The earnings in the first two months were not enough to buy coffee. There were investments in machines and other costs, but when Danka decided to open the company, we decided to use the savings that we had been preparing for 15 years to emigrate as a kind of a safety net until the work picked up speed. When you want to emigrate somewhere, you have to have some money on the account. For us, that money was the starting point for this and for the costs of living without a salary – adds Slaven.

After the first shelves and decorative items, they got the idea to make a decorative lamp for children. They then realized that nobody in the region was making such handmade wooden lamps for children and that there were maybe only 6 or 7 companies in Europe which did so. However, the road to making that lamp also required examining the best type of a diode for it, the kind of light that each one produced, how to get a quality product that would be primarily harmless and safe for children.



– I then realized that each product which uses electricity has to have the CE tag, which no small producer wanted to deal with. Since I had done some work in standardization previously, that topic and the European standards were familiar to me and, after several series of battery lamps, we decided that we didn’t want to sell or make anything until we got the certificate from an accredited lab saying that our product was absolutely secure and safe for use – says Slaven.

They indeed got the certificate around a year and a half ago. So far, they are the only company in the local market to make lamps for children with the CE tag.

In the meantime, they experimented with various details in an attempt to produce a lamp for children that their children would use as well. Around two to three months from making their first lamp and after 100 experiments, they discovered the LED diode which suited them the most. They still use that diode. Then, entirely unplanned, four months from the founding of the company and one month from producing the first LED lamp for children, one of the most beautiful things in life happened to them – Danka’s new pregnancy.

– The coronavirus is peaking, and she is pregnant – there couldn’t have been a bigger challenge to starting a small family business. However, we somehow pulled through it all. Without anybody’s help. Starting our days at 5 or 6am and ending it at 1am. Without grandma’s babysitting the children and with all the school and non-school activities that children have today – adds Slaven.



– The paints we use have a certificate for painting children’s toys. That means that children can put them in their mouths without a problem, and the paints are resistant to spit and very resilient. The wood, most frequently fir and spruce, is also certified, that is, bought from companies which have the FSC certificate, which means that the raw material comes from forests where the cutting down of the trees is controlled – notes Slaven.

Since the founding of the company, in the past three and a half years, Danka and their company TwoN have already received several acknowledgments. First the acknowledgment from the Chamber of Commerce of Serbia for corporate responsibility, then for one of the 100 most successful business women in Serbia, and then the “I am courageous” award of the Ana and Vlade Divac Foundation, so Danka was one of the finalists for the engineer of the year etc.

Still, even with the awards and the popularity among their followers on social networks, their sales in the local market did not go so smoothly. In order for a product to meet all the desired standards and be called ecological, energy-saving, harmless and safe, while being handmade, it unfortunately costs money.

And then as if by accident, and they say that there are no accidents, an invitation came for taking part in the biggest Nuremberg International Toy Fair Spielwarenmesse.



– The organizers of that fair came to Serbia to present us the fair and invite the producers to take part. We wanted to know how we could even take part in the fair and I was told that space had to be rented at that fair as much as a year ahead of the fair. And as I met one of the organizers and showed her our product at that promotion of the fair, she eventually called us, because she had found a place for us. After that, it was up to us to do the “easier” part – secure the money for the participation costs. We then took out a loan to appear at the fair – says Slaven.

At the fair, he adds, they were approached, among others, by an importer from Australia – the country they had previously wanted to emigrate to – wanting to order 200 of each of the exhibited models.

– We could only smile when we were offered that, with our capacity of 300 products a month and the two of us as the only employees. They only then realized that we were a small company, that those were handmade products, but who knows, we will certainly continue the negotiations – says Slaven.

Still, right ahead of the fair, they got great news.

– We were contacted by architects from Sweden who had picked our wooden wall lamps to equip a children’s hospital. The reasons they picked us, even with all the producers from the EU, as they said, was the design, the tested quality, the delivery deadline and, finally, the price.



Although it was probably easier for them to pick a producer from the EU, they chose us – Slaven says with pride.

He says that, in the meantime, there were also some orders for Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands and Iceland, and negotiations with Italy are ongoing, which they find especially flattering as it is a country known for its art and design.

Danijela Stanimirovic-Gavrilov

Privredna komora Srbije

Fond za razvoj Republike Srbije Niš

DANKA ŽIVKOVIĆ PR TWO N KIDS FURNITURE & DECOR

TwoN

Spielwarenmesse

toy fair in Germany

Nuremberg

Alibaba

Ja sam odvažna

I am courageous

Ana and Vlade Divac Foundation

Danka Živković

Slaven Živković

lamps for children

ecological product

product safety

CE quality tag

wood industry

interior design

carpentry workshop

online sales

women entrepreneurs

micro companies

interior designer

production organizer

emigration

job abroad

decorative lamps

night lamps

quality standards

standardization

accredited laboratories

certification

LED diodes

family business

eco friendly

hospital for children

wall lamps

state subsidies

grants

small and medium enterprises

design copyright

waste reduction

investments