But let's back up. Because to understand what IFEX 2026 meant for us this year, you have to understand what led up to it.
What Is IFEX, and Why Does It Matter?
If you work in the furniture industry, whether you make it, buy it, or sell it, or just enjoy it, then you probably already know IFEX. The Indonesia International Furniture Expo (IFEX) is held every year, currently in the new Convention Center located at ICE BSD City in Tangerang. It is not just the largest furniture trade show in Indonesia, but also one of the most strategically important furniture events in Southeast Asia.
In March, thousands of buyers, designers, importers, and retailers from across the world come to this venue to source furniture directly from Indonesian manufacturers. This year (2026), the show ran from March 5 to 8, with over 12,000 attendees expected and more than 3,000 products on display.
But the real significance of IFEX goes beyond the numbers. Indonesia exported $2.43 billion worth of furniture and craft products in 2024. Its main markets, the United States, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, and France, are not buying Indonesian furniture simply because of price. They are buying it because of the craftsmanship, the materials, and increasingly, the commitment to responsible production.
IFEX is where that story gets told in person, to the people who need to hear it.
Natuzz Ohme Booth - IFEX 2026.
The Impact IFEX Has on the Indonesian Furniture Industry
For Indonesian manufacturers, IFEX is not just a sales event. It is a signal to the global market about where Indonesian furniture stands, and where it is going. The show carries institutional backing from Indonesia's Ministry of Trade, Agus Gumiwang Kartasasmita, and the Indonesian Furniture and Craft Industry Association (HIMKI), which gives it weight beyond its commercial value.
Year after year, deals that are negotiated inIFEX turn into shipping containers, long-term supply agreements, and lasting business relationships. For buyers, it compresses months of sourcing research into four days of direct, hands-on engagement. For manufacturers, it is one of the best opportunities in the calendar to demonstrate what they are truly capable of.
At Natuzz Ohme, we have attended IFEX for several consecutive years. Each time, we leave with new relationships, new orders, and a sharper sense of what the market is asking for. This year was no different, except that getting there was significantly harder than usual.
Year to year, we bring our best and newest items to show to the world.
Two Continents, 23 Days Apart
Let us be honest: the preparation window for IFEX 2026 was one of the tightest we have ever faced. And the reason was a good one, we had just finished exhibiting at Ambiente 2026 in Frankfurt, Germany.
Ambiente is one of the world's most prominent consumer goods trade fairs, held every year at Messe Frankfurt. Our team was there from February 6 to 10, presenting Natuzz Ohme to an international audience of designers, retailers, and buyers from across Europe. Frankfurt in February is cold, gloomy, and demanding. Exactly the kind of environment that stretches your team in the best possible way. Then the team came home. And with jet lag still in the bones, we had roughly three weeks to prepare for IFEX.
Three weeks sounds reasonable until you list everything that had to happen inside it: sample selection, booth design, logistics, sample delivery to ICE BSD City, briefing the full team, and finalising our Rupa Loka narrative so that every piece in our booth told a coherent, compelling story.
Ambiente, Frankfurt.
The team exhibited in Germany, presenting Natuzz Ohme's sustainable collections to European buyers and designers.
Return & Recovery
Team returns to Indonesia. Debrief from Ambiente, capture learnings, and immediately pivot to IFEX preparation mode.
IFEX Preparation Sprint
Sample selection, booth design finalisation, Rupa Loka theme development, logistics, and sample movement to ICE BSD City.
Booth Setup
Full team on site at ICE BSD City. Booth construction and styling in preparation for opening day.
IFEX 2026 — Live
Four days of product showcasing, buyer meetings, business conversations, and Rupa Loka in full expression.
Coming back from Frankfurt and stepping straight into IFEX preparation — it is demanding, but it is also proof of what this team is capable of.
Spokeperson - Natuzz OhmeThe back-to-back schedule was not accidental. Ambiente gives us direct access to the European market, peeking at future trends in the decoration and tableware industry. IFEX on the other hand gives us access to the global buyer community that travels specifically to Indonesia to source, more so for the furniture market. Together, the two shows represent the full arc of where our product goes, which is why we make the effort to be present at both, every year.
Despite a tight schedule, we managed to send our samples before the IFEX deadline.
What It Actually Takes to Prepare for IFEX
Attending a trade show like IFEX is not just about showing up with products. The preparation, especially when compressed into a few weeks, is where a company's discipline and identity get tested.
Sample Selection: Choosing What Represents You
The first and most critical decision was which samples to bring. With over 17,000 custom designs in our portfolio, choosing the pieces that would collectively tell a coherent story is a real creative and strategic challenge. We were not just selecting our strongest products. We were selecting pieces that embodied Rupa Loka, our theme for this year.
Every piece of chair, table, lighting, and accessory that made it into the booth had to fulfil one criteria: does this piece have meaning bigger than its physical form? This standard narrowed the selection quickly. And it made our collection sharper for it.
The Sample Logistics: A Race Against the Clock
Here is the part that rarely gets talked about, but is honestly one of the most stressful parts of any exhibition cycle: getting the physical products from the factory floor to the booth floor, on time, in one piece.
New samples from our production divisions do not all arrive at once. They come in waves, finishing at different times from different locations, each one wrapped, labelled, and ready for inspection. In the final days before IFEX, our team was receiving fresh samples and cross-checking them against the booth plan almost simultaneously. There was no buffer. If a piece arrived and something was off, a finish not quite right, a dimension slightly out, the decision to pull it or push it through had to be made immediately.
Once the full selection was confirmed, everything had to move fast. We loaded the samples onto large cargo trucks, the kind built for heavy, bulky freight, the kind you feel when they pass you on the toll road, and sent them directly from our warehouse towards ICE BSD City. Same day. No warehouse stop in between, no holding overnight. The timeline simply did not allow for it.
Watching a fully loaded truck pull out of the yard, carrying months of design work and weeks of frantic preparation, headed for the show. There is something both nerve-wracking and quietly satisfying about that moment. It means you made it to the next stage. The work is moving.
The trucks took the Jakarta-Serpong toll road toward BSD, navigating the kind of traffic that makes every logistics coordinator check their phone every ten minutes. By the time the cargo arrived at ICE BSD City, the booth setup crew was already on site and ready to receive. The handoff had to be clean because every hour of setup time at a venue like ICE is accounted for. There is no such thing as catching up once the clock starts.
Booth Design: Building an Environment, Not Just a Display
Our booth at Hall 2, Booth 16, was designed as a spatial expression of Rupa Loka. The goal was not to create a standard showroom. It was to create an environment where visitors could feel, almost intuitively, how Natuzz Ohme furniture moves between cultures, climates, and contexts.
The materials used in the booth itself echoed the materials in our furniture: honest, textured, close to their natural state. There is a consistency to that approach that our returning clients often notice. What you see at the booth is what you get in the product.
Preparing the Team, Not Just the Products
Our team came out of Ambiente with sharpened instincts about what international buyers are prioritising right now. Those learnings fed directly into how we briefed our IFEX team, how to frame our sustainability story, how to talk about materials with precision, and how to move a conversation from curiosity to concrete collaboration.
The double-show season is demanding on people. But it also produces a team that is genuinely experienced. By the time IFEX opened, our team had already had thousands of real buyer conversations in the weeks prior. That showed.
Our team successfully built a booth to showcase our newest products.
Rupa Loka: Why This Theme, Why Now
Every year at IFEX, we centre our showmanship around a single idea. In 2026, that idea is Rupa Loka. It is the most deliberately considered theme we have ever brought to a trade show.
Rupa comes from Sanskrit, meaning form or appearance. Loka also comes from Sanskrit, referring to nature or the world. In Buddhist philosophy, Rupa Loka refers to the "realm of form", the material and tangible plane of existence. For Natuzz Ohme, we interpret it as the appearance of nature in its essence: characterised by the subtle and refined form of each material we use.
Rupa Loka frames furniture as something created to live in the world. Each piece begins with natural materials, but its final shape is resolved through real-world demands: function, scale, movement, climate, and cultural context. Rather than expressing nature as an abstract idea, Rupa Loka focuses on how form performs and belongs across different environments, with major consideration on the natural characteristics of the material.
The result is furniture that travels easily across borders, adapts naturally to different spaces and climates, and remains relevant beyond a single place or moment.
Rupa Loka is not just a theme — it is a reflection of how we think about design responsibility. Form should serve the world it enters.
Spokeperson — Natuzz OhmeWhy This Theme Resonates With Our Clients
The reason we chose Rupa Loka goes to the heart of who our buyers are and what they actually need. Our furniture ends up in hotels in Europe, cafes in Australia, residential developments in North America, and retail spaces across Asia. Every context is different. Every climate behaves differently. Every market has its own expectations of how furniture should look and last.
For a manufacturer deeply rooted in Indonesia — its forests, its materials, its craft traditions — the challenge is always the same: how do you make something that belongs everywhere it lands, not just where it was made?
Rupa Loka is our answer to that question.
How Rupa Loka Lived Across Four Days at IFEX
We structured our booth experience around the philosophy across all four show days. Day one was about setting the context — introducing visitors to our approach through raw textures, honest materials, and forms that stay close to their natural origin. Day two went deeper into substance: material choices, low-chemical processes, and how disciplined design allows natural materials to perform in modern, global spaces.
Day three shifted toward collaboration — inviting designers, brands, and potential partners to explore what could be built together. And day four was about continuity: turning conversations into real next steps, whether that was a first sample order, a custom development brief, or the beginning of something longer.
That structure was not accidental. It reflects how we believe meaningful business partnerships are actually built — not in a single exchange, but across layers of genuine conversation.
On the last day at IFEX, we also disassembled our booth.
Who We Are and Why We Keep Showing Up
Natuzz Ohme was founded by Jeffrey Tan, a furniture professional with more than 25 years of experience who began as a quality controller in Indonesia and Malaysia before eventually establishing his own company. Today, Natuzz Ohme is headquartered in Singapore with production operations across more than 60 divisions in Indonesia.
Our name carries our identity. Natuzz is inspired by nature — an influence that runs through everything we make. Ohme represents creativity that refuses to stay within expected limits. Together, they describe a company that makes furniture grounded in the natural world but shaped by genuine design ambition.
We are FSC-certified, meaning every piece of wood we use comes from responsibly managed forests — certified, traceable, and held to an internationally recognised standard. We are also Qarma quality-checked, and our production upholds ethical manufacturing standards throughout.
Every month, we ship over 40 containers to clients worldwide. Every product passes a multi-stage quality inspection before it leaves our facility. Behind each order is a dedicated merchandising team that understands not just furniture, but the markets our clients operate in.
IFEX is where we can most directly demonstrate all of this to buyers who matter. Walking through our booth gives a visitor a compressed but accurate experience of what it is like to work with Natuzz Ohme. That is the point — and why we invest in doing it properly, year after year, even when the preparation window is tight.
What Comes Next
IFEX 2026 is behind us now. The booth is down, the samples are making their way back, and the team is already working through the conversations that need to continue. Because the real work of any trade show begins after the last visitor leaves the floor — the follow-ups, the sample requests, the custom briefs that will become production runs.
These are the reasons we show up. Not the show itself, but what the show makes possible.
For anyone who once visited us at Hall 2, Booth 16, or anyone who is only now discovering Natuzz Ohme, we would like to continue the conversation. Our next major event is Furniture China 2026 in Shanghai this September. But we are available long before that.
Rupa Loka does not end at IFEX. It is how we work, all year round.
