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| Technical
Finishing Services produces stain & paint finish samples and sampling programs. We started our business from the ground up making wood finish samples for the wood products industries. We are now the leading stain & paint sample supplier for most of the largest office furniture manufacturers in the USA. Over the years we have added to our capabilities by making samples for ANY manufacturers that need to sample their color offerings. We will produce your color samples, on-time, color accurate and affordable - guaranteed. We're confident that your customers will notice that quality. If you need stain and paint samples from the simple or very complex, call us. Are you a manufacturer producing furniture, kitchen cabinets, paint coatings, flooring, windows, window treatments, millwork, doors or a large retailer? Are you still waiting for your sample department to make your samples? And when you do get them - are they always right, on-time & on budget and have the quality you need and looks better than your competitors? If not (or even if they do and you would like to look at costs), give us a call to explore all the possibilities of outsourcing your sampling. We take the hassle out of making samples. Find out why many have chosen to outsource this important part of their merchandising sales aids. We're samplemakers. It's all we do. |
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The History
Technical Finishing Services was founded in 1988 as a division of a 100+ year old, family owned company, Colwell Industries, Inc. which is the world's largest sampling company. The start up idea for this business was prompted by inquiries from current customers of Colwell Industries other manufacturing divisions, that were expressing a desire to out source their wood finish sampling. A 16,000 square foot building, located in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota, was secured to house the new endeavor. Insistence on quality standards, fair pricing, on-time delivery and our ability to produce quality sampling programs have generated our steady growth. |
| The
Competition The biggest obstacle facing TFS was convincing our potential customers that we could reproduce their wood finishes accurately and be a cost effective alternative versus producing these samples themselves in-house. Great amounts of time and effort were exerted in this bold attempt. We specifically geared the manufacturing departments to achieve maximum efficiency and color control throughout the manufacturing process of the wood finish samples. Specialized manufacturing equipment was designed and built to offer our customers special edge treatments and a variety of looks for their samples. We like to think of ourselves as an extension of each of our customers own finishing departments and attempt to participate with them in the new challenges facing these industries. We continue to strive for improvement in quality and service. Our main objective has always been to help our customers maintain a quality looking wood finish sample that is very consistent in finish appearance and color. We also like to participate with our customers in offering new and unique ways to display their wood finish samples. We can produce all your required finish samples. If you need samples that can be hung on an existing showroom display, fit into a box for your display cabinet, slid into catalog pages for your dealers, single samples for the interior designer's or customer's use or fan decks for use by general contractors and architects, we know we can help you fulfill any of your requirements. Our customer's have benefited with cost savings and color consistency by having TFS produce all their stain & paint sampling needs as a single source for your sales and merchandising tools. |
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The Finishers
Our company's foundation was built on a core of talented & experienced finishers. Each of our finishers has 20+ years experience working at TFS. Color matching your stain wood finishes is their specialty. Our 'bread & butter' around here is producing samples for Office Furniture & Kitchen Cabinet manufacturers. But we do produce samples for many other manufacturers needing samples: Paint Manufacturers:
If it is a liquid coating, we can sample it - on wood, paper, metal, plastic, etc. |
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The Service
We fully realize that a wood sample produced by us can be your customer's first impression about your manufactured quality. Each sample is individually inspected to assure a quality presentation and a commercially acceptable color match. We offer you a wide range of alternatives for processing your samples. TFS also works with your High Pressure Laminate and Thermally Fused Laminate supplier and can also convert those panels into sampling. We take care of everything including painting all edges & backs, printing & applying labels, inserting your samples into poly sleeves or catalog binder pages, collating and building fan decks and any other specific packaging or displaying situations you require. To help our customers maintain current inventory quantities and help ease budget constraints, TFS offers a just-in-time program. TFS will maintain inventories of your finish samples and ship to your manufacturing plant or your ad stock distribution vendor on an as-needed basis. With the JIT program, we utilize the efficiency of the internet & custom build password protected web pages for each of our customers. This enables our clients, when their time permits, to view & track the status of their inventory, past usage data, finish & color codes, and shipping & invoicing data. This helps even out your cash flow & budgets, because we only invoice what we ship as you need them. |
| The Process
Our specialized equipment for processing the finished products into wood finish samples is second to none. We offer a variety of edge treatments and sample chip sizes. Your samples can have a variety of packaging options from labels to sleeves. Large runs or small, TFS will create the sampling tools you need, with the quality you expect and on-time delivery. Why not find out why the majority of the largest office and kitchen cabinetry manufacturers have TFS as their wood finish sample supplier. Cost is important too and TFS usually produces for about the same cost or less, versus producing them in house. If you want to make that first impression of quality finished products to your customers, we deliver. If you have ever lost a sale due to not having a sample available, or your sample was not a quality presentation needed to secure that order, or you had problems with your samples not replicating your target color, please contact us for to learn more about the possibilities of improving your company's sales aid tools. If you would like a more in depth look at TFS, please take the plant tour on how we produce typical stain samples. If you would like to see some displays that we have built for coating manufacturer's, click here. You can contact us by email or call the plant at (763) 571-3902 between 8 - 4:30 central time. © 2001-2012 Technical Finishing Services, Inc. |
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 7541 Commerce Lane NE Fridley, MN 55432 Phone: (763) 571-3902 |