From Tailoring to Manufacturing: How a Sector Grew Up

A country’s need for automatic doors does not arrive before its garages do. In the early nineties Türkiye did not yet have an enclosed-garage culture; even those who owned a car mostly had no garage. So the first automatic doors arrived not as a need but as a luxury — American and European made, boxed, from across the sea. The sector’s first profession in Türkiye took its shape accordingly: installation.

We do not tell this as a flaw; nobody is born a manufacturer. Every industrial branch begins learning by assembling what someone else has made. The question is whether you stay on that step.

The tailoring years

There is a step above installation, and we are not shy to name it: tailoring. Importing the parts separately and cutting the door to measure here — the fabric from abroad, the cut from us. We did this for a long time, and we owe those years a great deal: tailoring taught us the door’s anatomy by heart. Which track tires under which load, how many cycles a spring truly lasts, where a panel sweats — these are learned not from a catalogue but at the cutting table.

But a tailor has a limit: he cannot weave the fabric. The most critical layer of quality keeps being decided in someone else’s factory.

Starting to weave the fabric

We crossed that limit step by step. First the tracks were brought into domestic production; in 2005 the first domestically produced sectional door panel came off our presses; in time a substantial part of the profiles moved onto our own lines as well. In those same years the need itself was changing: yesterday’s luxury became the standard first of housing compounds and villas, then of industrial facilities. As the sector stretched from the private garage door to logistics sites with loading bays, staying a tailor had already become impossible — the chronology of our thirty-plus years of manufacturing is really the chronology of that necessity.

The road not taken

Let us also say this honestly: remaining an importer was the commercially easier road. Bringing in a finished product and putting a brand on it — we knew that trade as well as anyone, perhaps better, because the tailoring years had taught us the inside of the door. That road was not taken; because a trade without infrastructure, spare parts and service responsibility cannot vouch for the tomorrow of what it sells. Manufacturing was the tiring choice, hungry for capital and patience — but in our founder’s own measure, it is precisely what binds a person to their work: if you can produce, if you can innovate, if you can set yourself a target, the work does not wear you out.

Today this sector sells to Europe and America the counterparts of the imported doors whose boxes it once opened. It took thirty years for a story that began with installation to reach this line. And the answer to what comes next hides in the same logic: whichever step we stand on, we are looking at the one above.