Vestate Moulding Ltd.

Vestate Moulding Ltd.

Turning Passion into Beauty for 15 Years

By Mark Kandborg

Wei Wong.

W

ei Wong, owner and president of Vestate Moulding Ltd., is a bit of a renaissance man. Today, he’s a painter, a photographer, an entrepreneur and a businessman, but when he and his family arrived from Malaysia in 1986, Wong had a tough time deciding between a career as chef or one as a hairdresser. In the meantime, he took a job as a picture framer at a small framing shop. Temporarily, of course. Such are the small, almost offhand decisions that can alter the course of a life.

Although he knew nothing about framing when he started, Wong learned very quickly. So quickly that in 1993, he opened a retail framing shop of his own. His brother Willie, an artist in town for many

years, integrated a gallery into the venture and the combination gallery and frame shop became Kamena Gallery & Frames Ltd., which Willie runs today with their two other brothers.

With Kamena Gallery in good hands, Wong moved on to create an early version of Vestate.

“I originally started Vestate as an importing company, where I would source factories overseas and bring in wood products. Not just mouldings for picture framing, but furniture and flooring as well to supply to local wholesalers.” It didn’t take long for Wong to realize that, in this case at least, dealing with three disparate elements was not an advantage. So, he cleared furniture and flooring from his plate and honed in on what he knew

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best – the business of picture framing. He also decided that rather than supplying what he imported to wholesalers, he’d become one himself.

“We started with a 3,000-square-foot location and started growing immediately,” Wong says.

Not only did he supply material, he began doing custom framing for galleries that didn’t have that capability. He also stepped up his already successful importing game a notch or two. “I travelled internationally to source materials, which was a big challenge because no one would tell you which were the best factories.” However, true to his nature Wong persevered and through a process of trial and error, found what he was looking for.

In fact, he brought back so much hard-to-find, high-end material that within a year he couldn’t store it all. So, he acquired a shipping container and filled it. He got another container. He filled that, too. Time for an additional warehouse. Then a third. Keep in mind that Wong wasn’t operating a museum here, he was operating a wholesale business, which was moving large quantities of these same materials out the door to his customers. But he was thinking big. In the same way that you don’t dress for the job you have, you dress for the one you want, Wong wasn’t setting up for the business he had. He was building the business he wanted.

When the leases came up for renewal, Wong decided to hand back all of the keys and trade them for just one. This key opened the front doors of a new 18,000-square-foot warehouse on 166 Street

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and 114 Avenue, where you can find Vestate today.

Now Wong had the space to really do something special. “We were the first wholesale distributer in Western Canada to bring in MDF mouldings. We also took on polystyrene. We did this because of the challenge in acquiring specific wood species suitable for making mouldings.” This challenge has become quite acute in the moulding industry, which makes sense when you think about it.

We’re running out of trees. While wood is a renewable resource, there’s less and less of it available as the real estate it requires shrinks daily. While wood may be wood to a chainsaw, it takes very select species to make quality mouldings, and that’s the only kind Wong is interested in.

15 YEARS

When the leases came up for renewal, Wong decided to hand back all of the keys and trade them for just one. This key opened the front doors of a new 18,000-square-foot warehouse on 166 Street and 114 Avenue, where you can find Vestate today.

“As of today, it’s getting harder and harder to acquire those species,” Wong says, adding that there’s still a debate over whether it’s better to use a recycled product like polystyrene versus cutting down trees to make frames. “In the beginning, we had challenges with people not wanting to touch plastic because they would assume that it’s lower quality. But with the technology today, if you hold wood and poly you won’t be able to tell which is which.” He’s right. I tried. You can’t. Wong explains that there’s also a consistence of quality with synthetics over wood, and that using them is far more efficient than the biological model. Basically, if you want 10 feet of moulding, you get 10 feet of moulding.

“The biggest challenge for all moulding companies in North America is still that factories can’t find all the wood they need to supply the demand out there, so they’ve started using imported pines from Brazil and New Zealand.” But, as Wong goes on to explain, there’s a problem with that. In a word: humidity. It simply won’t work. It’s too dry here, especially in Alberta and especially in winter.

When these species leave port in New Zealand or Brazil, they’re straight as an arrow. When they arrive here, as Wong says, “they’re like hockey sticks.”

Despite the challenges inherent in sourcing the highest quality woods for Vestate custom-

ers, Wong is consistently able to provide the best the world has to offer; such as famously exquisite blood wood, named for its deep, exotic reddish colour. “Some people just prefer a natural material,” he says, which is why Vestate is the only wholesaler in Western Canada to carry just as much wood as poly. Wong has spent years visiting factories to learn everything there is to know about wood, from species selection to varnishing to packaging.

Couple that with his years working in the picture framing industry following trends and emerging technologies, and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in Western Canada with a firmer grasp of the advantages and disadvantages of all the moulding options available. The end result? “We want people to be completely informed about what they’re buying, and to be able to choose from the best options available.”

Another thing that sets Vestate apart from the competition is their design capabilities. Wong has the ability to go from a drawing in his office to a product on the wall within a few months, and his own designs are now outselling all other profiles.

That’s quite a feat. This capability, and the fact that he buys direct from factories, means that his turnaround time is notoriously quick across the board.

Buying direct from the manufacturers enables Vestate to bring in very large volumes of product,

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“Fluctuation” Photographed at Waterton Lakes National Park, AB. One of Wong’s favourite places to photograph.

which means they can supply to the customer very quickly, even with large orders. “A 100 frames or a 1,000, we can supply them,” he says. “Our competition will have to order materials from distributers, but we already have the stock.” Is your company hosting a golf tournament and wanting to create memorabilia for the occasion? Vestate can design and build a complete framing package with your company logo, a laser-etched signature and photo of the event – as many as you need – and deliver them on time. Or maybe you’d like your clients and staff to receive a keepsake to commemorate your company’s 50th anniversary. These are just two examples of the kinds of custom products that Vestate, with its ability to design, print, etch and frame, excels at creating.

While Wong has worked hard to create a company you can depend on, it is perhaps the Vestate team that makes him the most proud. “Anybody can source and buy and set up a business,” he says, “but it’s our people that set us apart. It’s our service that got us where we are today. It’s not just what you sell, it’s how you sell it. Customers know us by our first names, and we know them well enough to know exactly how to help them. When you call us, you’ll talk to staff members who know the product from beginning to end and when it’s time to do the job, they’ll roll up their sleeves and do it.”

Wong’s passion for painting and photography led him to form W2 Gallery, which works hand in hand with Vestate. Throughout his travels, Wong has developed a unique photographic style, frequently

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www.w2gallery.com

focusing on the subtle beauty within patterns of water. When he prints these images onto canvas, they take on the colour textures of an oil painting.

But unlike an oil painting, W2 can make them any size, and of any number. “It’s been hard for customers to find pieces that are large enough,” Wong explains, “even for some of the big houses you’re seeing now. You could hire a painter, but it takes a long time and you won’t have volume. You’ll get a piece at a time.” W2’s start-to-finish framing and installation now provides interior designers, galleries, corporate clients and hotels with a perfect solution to their needs. “I started W2 as a hobby,” he says, “but it’s turned into a growing business.”

This month, the celebration of Vestate Mouldings’ 15th anniversary carries with it the lesson that following the paths that you choose, learning as much as you can along the way and cultivating your passions with each step can take you to more places, and create greater things than you ever dreamed.

16602 - 114 Avenue Edmonton, AB T5M 3R8 Telephone: (780) 433-1695 • Fax: (780) 439-2067 Toll Free (866) 433-1695 www.vestatemoulding.com