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How Kalfire made top sales during the pandemic
The Challenge
Design, innovation, sustainability and innovative technology, that’s what distinguishes fireplace manufacturer Kalfire. With such a proposition, the worldwide demand increases, with the corresponding requirements and wishes. Where do you put your focus, when many opportunities for growth arise? How do you translate your strategy into daily practice? And how do you maintain room for innovation when there is a lot of pressure on production? Beijko van Melick, CEO & owner of Kalfire, asked Stay Future Proof for help because of their fast, contemporary and practical approach to strategy, innovation and business transformation.
Stay Future Proof's approach
Stay Future Proof started with a two-day strategy session to identify relevant trends and developments. The next step was to formulate a mission, vision and ambition.
Eefje Jonker, CEO & founder of Stay Future Proof: “Kalfire has been a customer of ours from the very beginning and their issue fits exactly with what Stay Future Proof stands for; running your current business while looking for future value creation. Making and keeping your business scalable and future-proof.
If you also want to maintain the atmosphere and approach of your family business while growing and innovating, it is important to involve and make everyone in the company part of it.
“Together with all employees, we worked out how you can contribute to the vision, mission and ambition from your own role. From Stay Future Proof, we formed a multidisciplinary team with Kalfire and together we developed a roadmap so that it is clear to every employee what needs to be done to give substance to Kalfire’s ambition and strategy. This way, we worked together on an innovation process that increased the innovative capacity and shortened the time to market.
And very practically: we had the assembly hall connected to the offices. That way you literally have more connection with each other.”
Results
Stay Future Proof guides Kalfire in a different way of working, focused on Search and Execute: creating space for innovation alongside running your daily business.
Beijko: “Stay Future Proof taught us to work together with all employees on innovation in such a way that we can also run our daily production. We have a dashboard that provides insight into the status of our ambitions. Each year, we make our vision concrete for the following year and adjust our strategy on the basis of the insights we have gained in that year and the relevant trends. And each year, we translate our ambitions into kpi’s and how each individual employee can translate this into their own competencies and ambitions. We do it together! And that led in 2020 to the development of a unique new fireplace, the Kalfire E-one. A hologram fireplace with the experience of a real fireplace. With this we play in the trend of sustainability and make use of the newest technologies.
The Stay Future Proof strategists really want to help you make your business a success and you can feel that drive and passion. Without Stay Future Proof we would never have been able to grow so much, and that during a pandemic. Our mission is and remains to connect people. From time immemorial, a wood fire has been an invitation to pay attention to one another. To have conversations around the fire. We want to do that too, but in accordance with the requirements of our time. Stay Future Proof more than lives up to its name and helps companies to become and remain future proof.”
- Kalfire grew 40% in sales over the last 3 years
- All Kalfire GP fireplaces have won the 2019 Iconic Award in the ‘Innovative Interior’ category
- The Kalfire E-one, the hologram fireplace, has now won 4 awards and is nominated for the German Design Awards 2022 this year.
Beijko van Melick
–– CEO | Kalfire
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