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Business award winners tend to be earnest: but
there is a touch of humour about the fishes and
dolphins that swim across Société
Mosaica’s tiles. It comes from Abdelkader Ben
Schehida who, apart from being joint managing
director, does the painstaking work of converting
Roman designs into tiles which can be made in his
factory in Tunisia.
The
design in an eight-inch tile is made up of 400 or
more small stones, set in a specially devised
mixture of cement, marble powder and marble
granules. Abdelkader accidentally drove a truck
over some of them and they did not break.
Mosaica’s tiles are unique: lighter than the
mosaic tiles made by local craftsmen for tourists,
easier to use than Israeli mosaic tiles which are
sold in sheets. Their rarity commands a price of
£22, at Fired Earth’s showroom in the Fulham
Road, London. In spring 1996, sales took off. With
a big customer also in the United States and a
smaller one in Belgium, the factory at El Ghraba,
15 miles from Sfax, strives to keep up. It plans to
be making 300 square metres of tiles a month this
year. This means setting over three million pieces
of mosaic monthly.
Mosaica’s directors searched far and wide for
coloured stone. Eighty people are employed cutting
it and assembling the chippings into tiles. The El
Ghraba area, largely devoted to olive-growing,
lacks jobs. Europe no longer buys so much of its
olive oil. Most Mosaica workers are dexterous young
women, many of them skilled at traditional carpet
weaving. Some work at home, with their own assembly
frames and stonecutters. This is more acceptable to
their families who need their help in the home or
the olive groves. They are paid per tile and can
earn as much as in the factory.
There is also a tile workshop at a handicapped
association in Sfax. This is sponsored by British
Gas, the major British investor in Tunisia. It
enables over 20 disabled people to earn their own
living, rather than rely on handouts. (Some
recruits who simply expected handouts or were used
only to repetitive tasks did not stay.)
Mosaica has even found work for handicapped
women with only one usable arm. They sort through
rejected stone for useful pieces. Mosaica’s
disabled workers come from a wide area and may live
far from a bus. Some young women come by taxi.
The story of Mosaica began in 1993 when
terrorism forced foreigners including two British
business executives, Peter Quincey and Roger
Humberstone, to leave Algeria in a hurry. They
returned to Britain and then went to Tunisia
intending to invest their savings in a business and
find a more peaceful and hospitable
environment.
British banks refused them loans, even on the
deeds of their houses. But Peter Quincey looked
forward to being his own boss after working for a
big firm.
They tried selling John West tinned food, and
Guinness. These proved too dear and the market was
too small. They also tried exporting almond oil to
the Body Shop. They looked at the potential of
Tunisian marble.
They were both interested in Roman sites, and
Tunisia has more Roman mosaics than any other
country. They got tables made in Sfax, with mosaic
set in the tops, and put these on show at Wembley
in February 1995. Visitors were attracted by the
mosaic rather than the tables. David Smallbone of
Paris Ceramics said that, if they could produce
mosaic in tile form, it would sell.
In 1995 they joined up with Abdelkader Ben
Schehida, who provided the factory, and Moncef
Belghith, who tackled the technique of tile
production. Abdelkader holds a doctorate from the
Sorbonne and was also a visiting scholar at
Harvard. After returning home, he set up a business
making wooden educational toys and ran it for 12
years.
After endless approaches to Fired Earth in
Britain, Peter Quincey persuaded a buyer there to
give him five minutes to show his tiles. They were
minutes well spent. Fired Earth placed a
£33,800 order for 300 square metres.
Abdelkader had to train workers. The order took
a long time to fulfil and sales were slow at first;
but Mosaica has now shipped four orders to Fired
Earth.
Finding one well-known customer made it possible
to find others in Belgium and the United
States.
Peter Quincey and Roger Humberstone have
invested £150,000 in all, which they do not
expect to recoup for many years. They own 30 per
cent of Mosaica. Peter says: “You start something
and you believe in it and you just keep going. We
have worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for
three years.”
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