CLIENT
Pomar is a Finnish family-owned footwear company with more than 60 years of history.
As the company approached a generational transition, it faced a fundamental question about its future. Pomar had no shared high-level strategy, different generations of owners needed to find common ground, and many established ways of working reflected what had made the company successful in the past rather than what would necessarily make it successful in the future.
Co-founders was invited to help the owners and leadership team find a shared strategic direction and turn it into action.
CHALLENGE
Pomar did not lack history, experience or knowledge of its business. The challenge was to decide what to carry forward and what needed to change.
The company needed a direction that made commercial sense while bringing together different generations of owners, creating commitment across the organisation and moving the business beyond established assumptions about how things had always been done.
The central question became:
How could Pomar build its next chapter without being constrained by the thinking that had shaped the previous one?
PROCESS
We began by building a shared understanding of Pomar’s current reality. We interviewed key stakeholders, analysed financial and product data and examined the company’s market position, customer proposition and internal operations.
The purpose was not simply to produce an as-is analysis, but to surface the different perspectives and assumptions shaping how Pomar understood its business and future.
Working with the owners and leadership team, we then explored alternative directions and translated them into strategic choices around market position, customer value, portfolio priorities and future growth. The strategy was developed iteratively, moving between long-term ambition and concrete near-term priorities until the two formed a credible and actionable whole.
WHAT CHANGED
The process gave Pomar’s owners and leadership team a shared strategic direction across generations and translated it into concrete priorities for the business.
Rather than ending with a strategy document, the work continued into implementation. Co-founders worked alongside the leadership team to turn strategic choices into projects, establish performance measures and KPIs, and track progress as the organisation moved from direction to execution.