Considering Jamie Krantz made his first kitchen back in 2004 when he only had a garden shed for a workshop, to have built Lincoln-based Krantz Designs into an £8m turnover business with 56 employees in just 21 years is a remarkable achievement. His near obsessive drive for quality, over-engineering and supreme service, together with the expertise of his business partner in sales, has seen Krantz Designs develop two kitchen ranges, examples of which are on show in the company’s Lincoln showroom and will shortly be available through a new showroom they are about to open in London: “Our Iconic range is our completely customisable offer,” Jamie explains. “Basically, if a designer can draw it, we can manufacture it. We don’t tie their hands at all. Then we have our Origin range. Origin is how we started making furniture. It is slightly less customisable but it’s more affordable.”
“We always like to use solid timber where we can – a lot of maple and American walnut. We also use European oak as well and Tulipwood, but predominantly we use maple for our frames. We make kitchens, dressing rooms, studies, boot rooms – whatever the client wants – and every room is set up and fully assembled, then quality checked by three people before it goes to the client’s house. We’ve done ski lodges in Meribel and houses in Nice but most of our work is in the London Home Counties, Essex and Kent.”
Jamie candidly admits, until around six years ago much of his manufacturing was bought in from subcontractors. “We were buying from a lot of small workshops,” he told me. “But we reached a point where we couldn’t get a reliable supply. The more we grew, the harder it was to find reliability and after sales service was always the area that let these companies down. Service has always been of paramount importance to me – service and quality. We needed to make sure our high end customers were getting both and that’s why we started to bring everything in house. Probably 98% of everything we do is now made in house.”
Like many furniture makers, Krantz Designs began with classical machinery but as the company grew, they invested in CNC. “We started out with SCM and the service we’ve always received from them has been really excellent. We provide the very best service to our clients, so we need that from our machinery supplier. If a machine goes down, I need to get it back up and running quickly so we can stay on schedule.”
Convinced SCM was the company he wanted to work with, Jamie went to Italy and it was there, with the help of SCM Group’s Product Area Manager for CNCs, that he specified the “morbidelli x400”.
“He gave us a full factory tour, then we started to get into the specifics of what we wanted to make. We had a rough specification when we went but with his help we specified the machine to a more detailed level. He talked us through the machines and the different models, the pros and cons for our type of work, and gradually we figured out what was needed.
Once we got into the nitty gritty, that’s what led us to increase the panel clearance height and add other things into the specification.”
“The next day, we went to SCM’s foundry where they cast the frames. It’s really impressive. You have to see it to get a proper impression of the build quality. The machine frames are really solid, robust and the precision they are working to is incredible. They’re over-engineered and I really like that. They’re made to last and if you get another five years out of a machine, that’s a massive cost saving, even if you spend another £20,000 to buy the machine.”
The machine Jamie ordered was one of SCM’s new generation nesting machines, a "morbidelli x400" CNC. Designed for batch-size-one production, it’s a very flexible machine that was tailored exactly to suit the furniture Krantz Designs is making – and, importantly, it’s a machine that caters for the company’s future needs. “I work with a business consultant who comes in every few months and one of the things he said to me was, Every time you buy a machine, think about the capacity you’re going to need in 10 years’ time. That’s really good advice and that’s exactly what I’ve done.”
The "morbidelli x400" cell in Jamie's workshop has an increased panel clearance. Instead of the standard 180mm, it has 250mm so it will work large-dimensioned components. Jamie also opted for SCM's 13.5kW JQX head as well as four suction cups and eight X-Pods that can be set directly on the spoilboard for swift changeover between different nesting operations. Easy, safe access to the machine is guaranteed with the Pro-Speed bumper security system and RFID detection to protect operators – but in addition, the cell is equipped with a 3500kg capacity loading table with automatic label printing and a 2200mm x 3190mm feed belt conveyor. Other than selecting the program and hitting the start button, there’s not much more the operator needs to do. It can be done from the Eye-M Top mobile console or the Techpad.
At the outfeed, the cell is equipped with an outfeed pusher and extraction hoods for panel cleaning so perfectly clean, cut and drilled nested components can be offloaded and edgebanded in one seamless operation. SCM’s Maestro Active human-machine interface software runs the complete cell and the IoT system with Telesolve backup provides reassurance that the machine is being monitored from Italy should any faults occur. A year after installation, Jamie has no faults to report: “It’s a really good system,” he tells me, “Though the machine’s been so reliable that we haven’t had to call on it.”
At the same time as ordering a Morbidelli X400 cell, Jamie also ordered a new edgebander: “We had a very basic edgebander but while we were in Italy we decided to order a Stefani KD. It’s a really great machine that provides just the finish we need. The quality it’s producing is far better than we had before. “It didn’t make sense to have two people operating the edgebander when, for a relatively small investment we could free up a second person, so we put a return belt on it. It really speeds the job up.”
The "stefani kd", which is equipped with SCM’s Fastback 25 panel return system, sits in a line with the "morbidelli x400" cell, so panels from the machining centre can be lifted from the outfeed and fed manually into the Stefani. The HP T-ERL specification Jamie chose includes an impressive array of units and both interchangeable gluepots and automatic positioning of two different radii for corner rounding, as well as a copying device for use with nested components, an infra-red ceramic lamp at the infeed, an edge brightening unit at the outfeed and Maestro active edge control. Like Jamie’s Morbidelli, his Stefani benefits from subscription to SCM’s digital services package.
“We’ve had both machines for about a year now and the only issues we had were at the beginning with the setup. We had a week of training with SCM. They were here for a week, then they came back for an extra couple of days when I took on a new CNC manager. He’d used other machines and found the Morbidelli very intuitive.”
Melvyn Earle for Furniture Journal (September 2025)
“I really can’t speak highly enough of the support we’ve received from SCM. We started with classic machinery from them and their after sales service was the reason we continued to buy SCM machines. SCM really stood out compared with some of the others we spoke to. We definitely made the right decision to stay with them.”
- Jamie Krantz, CEO di Krantz Designs
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