CLIENT
Harvia has grown from a Finland-focused family business into a global multi-brand market leader in the sauna and spa industry.
An extensive, high-quality product portfolio had played an important role in that growth. As the business expanded, however, Harvia’s leadership recognised that the portfolio had also become increasingly complex.
Co-founders was invited to help the management team understand where complexity was creating problems and identify the choices needed to strengthen the portfolio for the company’s next stage of growth.
CHALLENGE
Harvia’s strong customer-first mindset and deeply rooted “can-do” culture had helped the company respond quickly to opportunities and customer needs.
Over time, however, this strength had also contributed to an increasingly complex product portfolio. Some categories contained overlaps and internal cannibalisation, while others lacked sufficient focus.
The challenge was therefore not simply to reduce the number of products. Harvia needed to determine where complexity created genuine customer value and where it was beginning to work against the business.
The central question became:
How could Harvia reduce complexity without losing the responsiveness that had helped make it successful?
PROCESS
We began by building a comprehensive view of the existing portfolio and the organisational practices behind it.
Through in-depth interviews with stakeholders across different functions, we explored how the portfolio had developed, where people saw its strengths and where complexity was creating challenges. Bringing these perspectives together created a shared view of issues that had previously been experienced from different parts of the organisation.
From this understanding, we moved from the as-is to the could-be. Together with Harvia’s management team, we identified opportunities for improvement, developed recommendations and prioritised them according to their potential impact and feasibility.
The prioritised choices were then translated into concrete actions and an updated portfolio management process.
WHAT CHANGED
Harvia gained a shared management view of where and why its portfolio needed to change.
The work resulted in a prioritised set of portfolio optimisation actions designed to reduce unnecessary complexity and strengthen the offering for key customer segments. It also produced an updated portfolio management process covering the product lifecycle from end to end.
Rather than treating portfolio complexity as a collection of individual product decisions, the project gave Harvia a more systematic way to make portfolio choices as the company continued to grow.
