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GDM managing director Michael Eden stands in front of the company's new beam saw Photo / Bevan Conley

Michael Eden is a shopaholic - but he's not always looking at what's for sale when he goes into a shop.

The managing director of Good Design Matters (GDM) is often on the lookout for ways he can design shops to look better and so customers will spend more money in them.

His company - started some 40 years ago - designs and then manufactures retail store fitouts.

The names of his customers are well known in retail: Rodd & Gunn, Hannahs, The Warehouse, Mitre 10, Whitcoulls, Noel Leeming and more.

Those companies will consult with GDM as to what they want a shop to look like before the store fitout products are made and delivered from the Gilberd St factory.

The company has a series of large warehouses and offices on Gilberd St where workers and machines bend, cut and force metal and wood into the many parts needed to display retail products in a store.

To help, the company has recently acquired a new $400,000 Gabbiani beam saw that is helping to increase productivity.

With sales offices in Auckland and Brisbane, the majority of GDM's workforce - some 60 people - are in Whanganui, where Eden says what his company does often goes unnoticed. "We've been here 40 years and they [Whanganui public] have no clue. We bring in bus loads of school kids through and they all go 'wow', the teachers go 'I didn't know this was here'."

Eden hopes by raising his company's local profile it will open doors to more suppliers and a recently more pressing need, staff.

If 10 people walked through the door at GDM today, with the right attitude, Eden said he'd give them all jobs.

He's focused on kids coming out of high school for his future workers.

"That's where the bulk of people are.

"We went for 20 years without [enough] tradesmen being created - so we're suffering that now. It's about building our own."

Eden's company has been heavily involved with getting more people into trades - they were part of the founding group of INTRANZ, which worked to get people work-ready.

His back-of-the-envelope calculations have about 600 people leaving high schools in the city each year and a quarter of those go off to university.

"Kids are just getting picked up out of school, straight out into work ... if you're leaving school now you've got a job. But is it the job that you want?"

Eden said he expects some of those people going straight into positions after school will jump to other professions without too much thought.

"We've had a few leave here half way through their apprenticeship. I don't think they value it the same."

In the past people stayed until they completed their qualifications before they could move about in a certain industry, he said.

"Now I think young people think 'well I can go anywhere and do anything anyway, because I'm smart, I'm clever, I've got crossover skills'."

People often start at GDM in an apprenticeship or cadetship role before choosing a specialty to go into.

They take graduates from university because they often have computer-aided drawing (CAD) skills, Eden said.

"We're getting more and more of those people, but of course you don't actually have to go [to university]."

GDM has a catchphrase: 'save them from university'. Eden said the three or four years someone spends at university they could be training and working at a place like GDM, while contributing to the company's output.

"There's nothing quite like training on the job and learning how the job is by being in the job."

GDM was not always the operation it is today, Eden said.

"I started [as] a one-man band.

"I worked for myself for probably five years before I employed somebody then I figured out I was actually better at finding the work than I was at doing it."

His work started with a Whanganui menswear company called Warnock's.

"You have to be pretty old to remember them."

Warnock's went on a "rampage around the whole country", opening 63 stores in the 1980s, Eden said.

"We built and designed all these ... kitset fitouts for them so you could do it really, really quickly."

Before this when a store was fitted out, all that was done were simple clothing and wall racks to hold a paucity of items.

"Nothing moved, everything was sort of cabinetry and built-in," Eden said.

But Warnock's, with Eden's expertise, wanted simple kitsets they could expand into multiple new stores with ease.

"There were no examples of it - not in New Zealand. We created it ourselves and as we did that, we picked up other customers along the way and then the customers got bigger and bigger - that's all we did - we grew.

"For many years we led the way in kitset stores."

It's changed a lot since those days and the demand to refresh a store has been ramped up, Eden said, with malls now demanding retailers refresh every five years.

"It's like a fashion industry now," Eden said.

With those refreshes comes wastage and a big focus for Eden is avoiding things his company makes going to a landfill.

The product usually wears itself out - and the metal parts are recyclable.

"Generally with our fixtures they just get handed down. Thirty years later the stuff we made for Warnock's in the 80s is not in second-hand stores and markets and all because it's good stuff."

The Farmers store in Whanganui had a recent new fitout and some of the original fixtures Eden's company made for them 30 years are still there and being used.

Eden says GDM is driven by his customers' needs.

"They're clever, they travel the world, they want to look different, they want to see who's doing what.

"Plus the products they're selling are constantly evolving."

For Eden the way a product is displayed translates to its sales success.

"It's quite interesting you go into an Apple store ... everything is over the top flash because their product is.

"So everything's expensive but they don't build very many of them - they're not having to do massive rollouts. They're making their fixtures match the product."

He contrasts that with selling something like car mats.

"Then you'll probably have a more basic system, but it still has to be clever.

"You can't just stack car mats on the floor - you've got to be able to leaf through them."

Eden said he expected some big changes in the near future in the way fresh food was displayed and delivered.

"In Europe it's all live and behind.

"You can't get it, you've got to actually choose your bun ... you've got to fire it out the side, it falls down a chute and then you pick up your stuff.

"So you can't open a door and cough and sneeze all over everybody's stuff. So ours is all packaged so there's huge inroads still to be made."

Eden says his company will focus on getting more technology involved in his company's manufacturing but also on growing business in Australia.

"We haven't done as much as we could in Australia.

"In a lot of ways we're exporting our cleverness as much as anything ... Australia's going to be a big future for us."

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