Finnish Design Shop is a strong case of differentiation

Finnish Design Shop has found an interesting niche and cultivated that nicely. Finnish Design is an interesting concept that can include a lot of things and that can be used nicely in different kinds of marketing.

This differentiation from competition enables Finnish Design Shop to do things a bit differently. They don’t aim to do things like a normal home retailer.

With good strategic differentiation comes robust and profitable sales growth. Unlike traditional home retailers (IKEA not included), Finnish Design Shop (FDS) is one of the new generation of online home retailers that internationalise rapidly (FDS has customers in more than 100 countries).

In the recent few years Finnish Design Shop has grown to become one of the biggest challenger brands to the bigger furniture and home decor retailers. It is also notable that the growth rate of FDS clearly outpaces the rivals. Thus, it is not difficult to forecast that FDS will rather soon become on of the big home retailers in Finland (IKEA is in the league of its own with 380 M€ revenue).

Freshly different kind of marketing

Finnish Design Shop has a modern focus in its marketing. With the strategic differentiation to the design/higher-end products, FDS is not drawn into the big promotional campaigning style employed by many home retailers.

Finnish Design Shop focuses much of its efforts into content production. This has enabled it to become the biggest the most followed Finnish home retailer in Instagram with 243 000 followers. The next biggest, IKEA, has only one quarter of the follower base in Finland (globally the figure is naturally by far bigger than for FDS).