Founded in 1996, Zhejiang Kuka Home Sofa Manufacture Co., Ltd. (Kuka Home) specializes in the research, development, production and sale of living room furniture. Kuka Home integrates its profound understanding of home life, as well as living room life and culture, into the research and development of its products. Incorporating various subjects and technologies, the company has constantly developed sofas and other furniture with high-tech content as well as pioneering and reasonable design.

Presently, with 6,000-odd employees, Kuka Home is one of the most successful sofa manufacturers in the world, and has introduced world-class sofa manufacturing equipment and international cutting-edge industrial production, formulated a complete set of handicraft standards, and attracted a large number of technicians with superb craftsmanship. Besides its outstanding local designers, the International Sofa Research & Develop Center of Kuka Home has many world-renowned designers from countries like Italy, Germany, France and Japan. At least 50 creations are made each day, and hundreds of new styles of sofa are launched simultaneously around the globe each year.

Design sketch made with Wacom's Cintiq 21UX

Designer’s digital drawing board

Kuka Home actively participates in furniture shows to display its products and its designers regularly rank in the top three. More importantly though, it pays close attention to international furniture design trends and hopes to set the direction of R&D accordingly designing products that better cater to customer needs.

Impressive design is the soul of furniture products, so the product sketch plays a crucial role in exploring product styles. In order to precisely communicate the inspiration of designers to the Process Department, Kuka Home attaches much importance to “design expression” in the process of creating a product. Learning from the experience of foreign companies in the same industry, Kuka Home provides every Chinese designer with a Wacom Cintiq 21UX interactive pen display.

With a 21.3" screen, the Cintiq 21UX pen display adopts Intuos technology, enabling the designer to utilize a 1,024 pressure-level pen tip and eraser on the LCD display. Using the Grip Pen’s tilt sensitivity or the Art Pen’s double-barreled rotation functionality allows artists to accurately reproduce their intended effect and style. With all these techniques, designers with solid painting foundations will feel as if they are drawing on traditional media with traditional paint brushes, pens and pencils.

In addition, the screen of Cintiq 21UX can be adjusted freely inclining at various angles and rotating when needed. The customisable ExpressKeys provide quick access to frequently used modifier keys and keystrokes minimizing dependence on the keyboard. Meanwhile, the customizable touch strips enable designers to control aspects such as canvas size, brush size, opacity level, etc.

A designer with Kuka Home says, “The product is most applicable in our industry. For example, during early design, there was a link called a wire-frame. We could not position anything directly on the screen when painting with a mouse. But it is very easy now with Wacom Cintiq.”

Time saving and efficient

Kuka Home place great importance on product innovation and is very strict with the performance of its designers. Every designer is required to complete no less than 8 design plans in a month. The designers need to work efficiently, and time is of the essence.

Designers must throw themselves into work immediately after they have a new idea, then submit it to his director and associates to see if it has market value. With the help of the Cintiq 21UX, drafting, coloring and other processes can be finished easily on the pen display. Moreover, it is easy to restore and edit work in progress. Generally speaking, a design draft can be finished in about two hours saving much time for the busy designers.

Environmentally-friendly workflow. No paper needed.

Kuka Home, as a furniture manufacturer, has a profound understanding of the significance of environmental protection. Working with Cintiq 21UX, designers no longer need the large amount of paper that they once did, saving not only money, but develops a new environmentally friendly workflow.

Most people think of a furniture company as an old-fashioned workshop where carpenters work according to drafts. However, the successful application of Wacom Cintiq 21UX by Kuka Home promotes the quality of products and production efficiency significantly, for which the company won the favor of numerous customers and is hailed by industry insiders.

As a large manufacturing country, China still has many companies that need to alter traditional work patterns to bring themselves closer to the standard of world-class brands. Wacom, which insists on developing and offering well-designed, high-quality products and services to its clients, will definitely play an active part in boosting the development of these corporations.

A designer of Kuka Home is working with Wacom Cintiq 21UX.

High performance of Cintiq 21UX

Rotation identification

Some input tools have the function of rotation induction, so they can rotate around the axes. Cintiq 21UX can identify rotation and transform it into drawing in software like Painter9.

Touch Strip

Touch Strip with brand-new design, like the touch pad of laptops, can be operated with fingers for easy zooming in and out in graph software like Adobe Photoshop.
It can also realize scrolling and browsing in text or PDF files.

High quality UXGA 21.3-inch TFT digital LCD screen

The top quality LCD has a maximum resolution of 1600x1200 and 16.77 million color depth offering a fantastic visual feast. The operation area on the digital board reaches 432 x 324 mm (17 x 12.8-inches).

Dynamically-adjusted stand

The completely improved stand allows users to incline and rotate the Cintiq digital display easily, which improves the flexibility of graphic creation and satisfies the different needs of designers.

ICC color management

Every Cintiq product has an ICC color management system, compatible with Microsoft Windows ICM and Macintosh ColorSync.

The above sofa design of Kuka Home won upholstered furniture gold medal in 2007 13th International Famous Furniture Fair.



This sofa design of Kuka Home won the upholstered furniture gold medal in 2007 13th China International Furniture Fair.