The 375 year-old company shaking up the homewares category

From hiring fashion designers to collaborating with skateboard brands, the homewares category may well take over from the ‘It-bag.’

Wedgwood Sean Ziao x Vera Wang Lace collection.

Plates, crockery and champagne flutes may well be the new ‘It-bag.’ Fiskars – the 375 year-old Finnish company which owns homeware brands such as Waterford, Wedgwood, Royal Doulton and Royal Albert – is banking on it.

Late last year the company acquired Danish home and jewellery brand Georg Jensen, known for its silverware and sculptural jewellery. Outside of Denmark Australia is the brand’s largest market.

In the past few years Fiskars has started appointing creative directors to its brands, a role that did not exist previously within the company. Most of them come from the world of fashion. This includes the appointment of Janni Vepsäläinen, a former knitwear designer for cult London-based fashion label JW Anderson to one of Finland’s best-loved brands, Iittala. Vepsäläinen promptly shook up the 140 year-old brand – not without some ire.

Natahlie Ahlström, Fiskars chief executive since 2020, says this move has imbued its brands with new energy. Your great-great-great grandmother’s china this is not.

Nathalia Ahlstrom, chief executive of Fiskars, who was in Sydney last month.

“I think what we learned from fashion is also this being more a pioneer, being more fast paced. Fast paced in trying new things, driving innovation” she says.

So is Fiskars the LVMH – the luxury conglomerate that owns the likes of Louis Vuitton, Dior, Tiffany & Co. and hotel groups such as Belmond – of homewares?

“A bit, yes, and what brings us together is that our purpose is pioneering design …pioneering design brands for the home and outdoors. It’s all about heritage, craftsmanship, the unique design of the products. And then what really brings them together is that … in this portfolio, we know quite well how to grow these brands and then have different, distinct roles for the different brands. But we can nurture them all,” says Ahlström, who was in Australia last month.

“Because each brand is so unique, we want to run them separately. We want the people who are responsible for the brands to have end-to-end accountability. That’s extremely important for us,” she says.

“I would say that the synergy that we get then is that we have a portfolio where we then decide where do we invest, what to ensure that the big, well-performing brands that they’re doing better. So it then really comes to the portfolio logic, the investments logic, and also ensuring that we have the best talent in the best brands.

“The brands are so unique, so we want them to stand on their own feet and be very decentralised and independent.”

Keeping the brands’ unique design identities separate, while creating power in unity is a key strength of LVMH. The stronger brands can compensate for the weaker ones, and the group has shared power in back-end office functions. A group’s might can attract star hires too.

As LVMH chairman and chief executive Bernard Arnault spoke to Bloomberg in an in-depth profile earlier this year of the group’s strategy,

Bringing the brands together, Arnault told Bloomberg, was “an idea I had after having bought Dior. I saw how the luxury market was made up of many medium-sized companies that, taken together, could be much stronger in a group composed of several brands.”

Having a diverse portfolio of brands also, obviously, gives Fiskars more scope. It is famous for its first products – orange-handled scissors and practical and hardy gardening implements you can find in Bunnings – but it also sells limited-edition special pieces from its heritage brands. The latter, Ahlström says “bring a halo to the rest of the brands”.

The appetite for luxury, she says, is extremely relevant to this category. Especially the kind of luxury Ahlström believes is the antithesis of throwaway culture.

According to a recent report from fashion and luxury trade publication The Business of Fashion the home design category is worth $US643bn ($978bn). Euromonitor International predicts this will grow at a 5 per cent annual growth rate through 2026 – faster than it was growing in 2018 and 2019.

Wedgwood Florentine citron pet bowls

“The opportunity of luxury, we see that over time, this is a very resilient category, there’s global demand,” Ahlström says.

The much reported global slowdown in luxury is something Ahlström believes to be a dip in the market, and that buoyancy will return.

“It’ll come back because long-lasting design, long-lasting quality and brands that stand for sustainability and so on they will be relevant also in the future,” she says.

Especially, she says, for products that have values. Sustainability, as Ahlström, is a “backbone” of the company. In its 2023 sustainability report it set out its ambition to have the majority of its sales come from circular products and services by 2030. This includes using recycled glass, gold and ceramics.

“Also it comes to our values. It’s a long-lasting value and the design of these products, our products are you have them forever. You hand them over to the next generation ... Also what’s important is when we talk about our heritage brands, they deserve this positioning and that also gives us opportunity to elevate the brands,” she says.

By elevation Ahlström means the experience in store, its story-telling, unique offerings and limited editions.

Recent collaborations have included Scottish artist Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY and Palace skateboards with Wedgwood.

Royal Doulton Old Country Roses collection.

Shaking things up fits with how Ahlström believes a 375 year-old company stays relevant.

“You can’t only look backwards. You have to cherish and understand what makes your heritage brand, what’s your craft and DNA, what’s your uniqueness? But if you don’t push the boundaries and renew yourself all the time, you will very fast become old-fashioned and not relevant for the consumer,”she says.

“At times it might feel radical, but when looking at the history of all our brands, they’ve always been radical. They’ve always pushed the boundaries. So this purpose of pioneering design really is true to who we are and how we behave.”