An effective and innovative growth strategy can take your business to the height you desire. It is important to learn from the ideation and innovation management or others in the industry. In this story, we will discuss how an employee turned into an intrapreneur and brought success to their company.
About:
Founded in 1967, Van Hoecke is a furniture company based out of Belgium. It is one of the market leaders in furniture components including hinges, lift systems and drawer systems.
An intrapreneur idea changed Orgalux’s marketing strategy:
Van Hoecke had been a leading player in the furniture components industry for decades, working as the distributor of hinges, lift systems, and drawer systems for their Austrian brand Blum.
The company started two other brands too – TA’OR and Orgalux. TA’OR markets industrially made wooden drawers, while Orgalux distributes inner dividing systems and kitchen aids. All of these were B2B businesses until a marketing manager entered the scene.
Stijn Van Avermaet figured that the company products were not reaching their full sales potential. So he suggested taking a B2C approach and going direct to market.
In 2017, Orgalux went B2C and offered various home organizing options to customers.
When asked about the inspiration behind going B2C, here’s what Stijn Van Avermaet had to say.
“There was a need for the end customer to have dividing systems if it was not sold by the kitchen manufacturer, so we decided to have a look at the B2C segment where we can sell these dividing systems through an online channel because we felt when we were in a fair, people were in our showroom, we felt really the enthusiasm for people to organize their kitchens.”
Results
In the interview with Bundl, Stijn mentioned that Orgalux got all the resources from Van Hoecke to venture direct-to-market. However, these were still unknown horizons and the team was trying various strategies to figure out the best way to make it work. After quite some time, Orgalux became a market success for Van Hoecke.
This wouldn’t have been possible without the intrapreneurial spirit of Stijn, which in his words, breeds in the culture of the company.
In our view, Stijn shares the spotlight with all the other intrapreneurs who have done amazing work, be it Nitin Prajanpe at HUL, Mr. Sivakumar at ITC, Kara Wenger at Zurich Insurance, or George Swenson at 3M. These are just a few and there are countless others whose efforts changed the fortunes of their organization. Want to know the reason behind their success? Effective idea capture and implementation form a great innovative growth strategy.
And you can get that for your organization too. How? Get your hands on the best idea management software today.
