Rob
Does the survey visits and most of the museum specifications.
Studio
Nine people, one building, a lot of dust.
Dunkan Display started in 2011 as one cabinetmaker with a rented bay. The bay is now the whole building.
How it started
Rob Dunkan trained as a cabinetmaker and spent eight years building kitchens before a museum asked him for a case. He said yes without quite knowing what he had agreed to, spent three weeks reading about relative humidity, and never really went back to kitchens.
The first stand came two years later, from a client who had seen the case and assumed we did exhibitions too. We did not. We do now.
How it works now
Nine people: four in the workshop, two on drawings, two who install, and Petra, who runs scheduling and is the reason anything ships on time.
We run a five-axis router and a spray booth, and we still finish by hand where the router leaves something a customer would notice.
The Konala workshop. The mezzanine went in during 2019 and immediately filled up.
Materials and waste
Exhibition work has a reputation for being disposable, and mostly it deserves it. Our answer is not especially clever: we build stands that come back. Frames are numbered, crates are made to fit them, and storage between fairs is part of what we quote.
Offcuts above roughly 400 mm go on a rack by the door and get used. What is left goes to a local company that chips it. It is not a certification scheme, it is just housekeeping.
People you will actually deal with
Petra
Owns the calendar. If a date is confirmed, she confirmed it.
Tuomas
Runs the floor and the router. Twelve years here.