This year The Vita Group is celebrating 75 years of being active in the flexible polyurethane space. The Manufacturer’s Molly Cooper sat down with new CEO, Omar Hoek, to discuss this milestone, his plans for the company and what’s next for The Vita Group?
The Vita Group began life 75 years ago in Oldham, Manchester, and has since expanded across Europe to 37 sites and 3,000 employees. The group is currently just shy of €1bn in revenue with 60% of that coming from continental Europe and 40% being UK centric.
The company has certainly come a long way over the years. Something that Omar acknowledged when we spoke. “We are active in both the bedding and furniture space using flexible polyurethane and we supply many of the large consumer brands throughout Europe. However, we are also active in the technical space.”
The Vita Group is divided into three areas. The first is mobility which for example, includes everything that goes into aircraft, trains, helicopters and inner liners for cars.
The second is underneath flooring. “We rebond post-industrial trim from known sources, from our own sites and from our customers, post-industrial trim as well as our own production trim to other sites. For example, we have three sites where we repurpose our polyurethane for flooring underlay and sports mats. This all counts towards our zero waste strategy,” said Omar. The third area is industrial and speciality, which includes hygiene, medical filtration, industrial sponges and similar items.
The new CEO
Omar has worked within the material space for over 30 years with a CV that includes many popular brands. “I have manufactured tea bags for Lipton, worked in the graphics space and produced fluid fluorescent light boxes and aircraft decorations. I was also in the label and packaging industry for almost 20 years and in the medical space for over ten, with Procter & Gamble making drapes, gowns and face masks.”
Omar’s experience and material science background made him the best choice to expand The Vita Group in new directions. “When The Vita Group had the idea to become more application and end user focused in the speciality areas, I got a call. They wanted to begin accelerating in other areas, outside of materials and bedding, and in areas I have worked in closely.” One of The Vita Group’s main missions is to focus on sustainability, and Omar has previously worked with Nordic companies on that very ethos, making him familiar with the goal to make a better impact on the planet.
“I joined the group in October last year and immediately began strategising and thinking where we should be accelerating, what we should optimise and what we should reconsider. Now, six months in, we are coming to the end of that process with new team members in place and a clear direction. I have decentralised more power to people within the commercial and operational teams, while centralising functional teams for better collaboration; people are excited about it because there’s a change and change brings opportunities.”
Making choices
Under his new leadership, Omar admits some big decisions have been made. “I had to think how I could retain the family spirit that is very much part of the DNA of the company while still creating a clear set of priorities around the new direction the group was going to take. I want people to grow within the company; if people always do the same thing then over time, this can cause some stagnation in a business.” Omar has introduced experts in the right areas of growth, especially within sustainability, emerging segments and geographies. “I have become more functional in the way in which the group operates. I have brought in some incredible individuals who are the best in procurement, commercial activities and in operations.
“Secondly, I put a lot more weight on externalisation and commercial business orientation of the organisation. We need to be questioning where the markets are and what is favourable? Where can we engage with players? How do we become more purposeful from a brand perspective?” Omar explained that one of his key goals is to make the company more offensive, making The Vita Group brand more powerful. “Many companies do not live to 75 years without moving into another area and adapting, so we can be proud that we have established good roots that we can continue to build on.”
The third role Omar is taking under his leadership is to accelerate the company’s sustainability agenda. “This is not greenwashing or an obligation to the authorities; this is an area we want to lead, and we have ways in which we are already doing this,” he said.
The Vita Group currently diverts ~99% of production waste and offcuts from landfill. “We are currently developing our circular product ranges in three ways. With chemical recycling, we are working with Dow and Evonik to develop our Orbis range. We have also been mechanically recycling our foam for over 25 years which goes to market as our rebond brand, Novus. This allows us to be a net consumer of trim; last year 26,806 tonnes of trim was diverted from landfill and repurposed. Finally, we are continuing to work with bio polyols created from a plant-based oil. These are constantly developing and our R&D teams are working to expand our capabilities.”
Omar appreciates there may be some caution around the changes being made, but also recognises that this is understandable and inevitable. “As someone who has lived in many different countries, I have always been the foreigner and I have first-hand experience of what it is like to be uncomfortable with change. However, with all the external factors and geopolitics, I’m trying to bring a little bit more agility into the company. We’re going through a period of transformation; we may make mistakes, but we will learn from them.”
Putting people first
One of the first appointments Omar made when he joined the company was a HR leader. “People are the greatest asset to a business, and it’s part of my personal drive as a CEO to see people grow, be happy and have a purposeful Monday morning when they come in.” Across the companies he has worked for Omar has a reputation in developing stellar employees and hopes that his authenticity will be something that he is remembered for.
“I’ve operated in businesses across the globe, and I have always found that people respond best when you speak honestly and authentically. In turn, this creates an environment where people are comfortable expressing themselves,” he said.
Diversity is extremely important to Omar and The Vita Group as a whole. Omar’s immediate team consists of five men and three women. “It is good to have a natural mix of people that are diverse in background and in culture; people should be in the roles that they deserve, not where they think they should be.”
The Vita Group has initiatives in place for its employees and the wider community that take place in its UK and European offices. “We encourage our people to contribute some of their time to the surrounding communities. We began a mental health campaign to encourage people to reach out to one another as it may not always be obvious when someone is struggling.” Omar also runs a regular coffee morning in which 200 employees attend via video call and can ask him any questions. He also uses this to introduce new people to the company.
Vita Group’s Middleton Innovation Centre.
Innovation
Omar believes that the industry needs to accelerate and invest more into the science around polyurethane and how it can be functionalised. “We need to be showing our innovations to customers and suppliers to make sure they know what we are capable of,” he explained.
“Having 37 sites across Europe requires you to centralise your innovations. But I also believe that the answer might not be within our organisation. We often have open innovation discussions where we tap into external partners to see what solutions they can come up with for the problems we have identified. Innovation becomes richer when more people can contribute.”
Polyurethane will not be the be-all and end-all of The Vita Group, as Omar begins steering the company in a more creative direction. “This will take courage to move beyond our traditional ethos of helping people sleep comfortably, but we need to be more disruptive when it comes to our innovations. I used to have a large R&D department at one of my previous companies and it allowed for many technologies to work together to see what could be created.”
Supply chains
Suppliers are partners in good and bad times and sometimes promises cannot always be kept, but companies need to be able to guarantee their supply will be there. “The relationship we have with suppliers is built on trust and myself and my procurement team do a lot to keep this in place.” Part of this is learning how to mitigate risk. “We know we can depend on each other in terms of extra consignment stock that we put in place, or simply being honest on delivery dates, rather than making them a moving target,” said Omar.
Lastly, he can see the value in bringing in new suppliers in differing geopolitical areas, where and when they may be required. “There’s always a reason to reduce your price and costs, but stability holds value too. In good times, we can innovate and in bad times, depend on each other to make sure we still have supply.”
The Vita Group has recently completed risk assessment mapping to examine the geographical positioning of its sites, asking if they are reaching the right customers and whether the correct infrastructure is in place in those locations to support this. “We have brought in a CEO from another company to help us get that expert bird’s-eye view on our operations. Then, we are strategising what processes are in place if they run into an issue. It is how a mature company should be operating during challenging times.”
The industry is highly dependent on petrochemical materials, so Omar has made it an additional focus to provide more guarantees to its suppliers and customers. “My aim is to bring stability to the supply chain so we can make room to focus on growth and innovation, not just absorbing deflation and inflationary trends which would keep a typical business very busy – spending time on the issues that the industry will be facing in the future and how we will tackle those.”
AI aiding expansion
For The Vita Group, AI is aiding in the company’s continued expansion across Europe while ensuring it sticks to its sustainability initiatives. “AI is providing us with tremendous power to map where our customers are, how we can serve them, where the billing or technical solutions are and if the right competence and capabilities are in place. This is a data driven approach allowing us to make the right decisions,” said Omar.
He confirmed that The Vita Group is relooking at its acquisition strategy to ensure company optimisation. “We’re redefining the purpose of our sites and implementing best practices from our top-performing sites across our entire footprint. “My aim is to drive the functionality of these sites by bringing in good leaders.”
At The Vita Group, the company’s head of sustainability has two main focuses each day. The first, being able to abide by the company sustainability credentials and the impact it has on the planet and the second, health and safety. “These are the filters that span everything we do. When we come up with new products, directories or sites, everything goes through these. What impact are we having on the planet and what is the exposed risk, internally and externally?”
By using these preconditions for everything it does, The Vita Group sets itself up to know when it is heading in the wrong direction and needs to re-evaluate. “Because of the science[1]based targets we have laid out, including Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions relating to our customers, suppliers and products, we are always asking ourselves questions. Where is best to source our energy? How do we eliminate of our waste? What raw materials do we need to transition away from?”
The Vita Group is extremely committed to its 2050 targets and is very ambitious. “I believe we are leading in the industry – in terms of moving away from using certain raw material components, the way we distribute, examining our CO2 impact – and I think we are extremely responsible with sustainability; it is by far, one of our strongest assets.”
For more articles like this, visit our Leadership channel.