Roni Tuominen, Country Director UK & Ireland at JYSK, talks about recent investments, providing a career path in retail and an update on their sustainable achievements.
Meet Roni
Roni Tuominen, Country Director UK & Ireland. I’m responsible for the overall success of the business across the UK and Ireland markets, this includes our retail presence, logistics, and finance.
Recent investments?
Currently we are continuously investing in expanding our store network with a target of 8-10 new stores annually to boost our retail presence. We are also in the process of bringing all our UK stores to the latest JYSK store concept, which provides the very best shopping experience and visual merchandising to our customers. Since the beginning of this initiative in 2022, by 2024 we aim to have completed 14 instore rearrangements out of 30 stores.
We have also recently announced our decision to establish a distribution center in Ireland to bring our logistical process closer to our customers, allowing us to shorten the lead times for replenishment and order fulfillment and also reduce our carbon footprint within our logistics.
Future plans?
Currently our focus is on continuing to profitably expand in both markets and grow our market shares against competitors.
Alongside this, we’re dedicated to providing great career opportunities within the retail industry through investing heavily in employee training and development. Our desire is to be prospective employees’ first choice in the retail industry and aim to have 90% internal fill rate in vacant positions.
What is your mission?
JYSK’s mission is to have a great Scandinavian product offering for everyone within sleeping and living, allowing everyone to enjoy the Scandinavian design and approach to life.
On sustainability, what is your business doing on this topic?
Our responsibility comprises of a number of areas, including all JYSK employees as well as employees working for our external partners globally. We must ensure that our products are made with respect for both humans, animals, and nature.
In the fall of 2020, we publicly committed to the FSC sourcing target that by the end of 2024, all JYSK products and packaging made from wood, cardboard or paper will be FSC-certified. As of 1st January 2022, this already applied to all new products launched in JYSK (FSCTM N001715). We also continue to focus on replacing plastic packaging with cardboard and increasing the amount of FSC certified cardboard where possible.
JYSK has also joined a Danish voluntary sector collaboration, which aims to reduce the environmental and climate footprint of the textile industry. By 2030, all garment and textiles from Danish companies will consist of at least 40% recycled materials and we are committed to reach this goal throughout our portfolio.
Increasing the amount of recycled content in the products is in general an important part of JYSK’s sustainability strategy, and the number of products that are fully or partly made from recycled materials is increasing with each new product assortment. Some of these carry the Global Recycled Standard (GRS) label. Going forward, JYSK will strengthen the focus on GRS, and as an important part of this journey JYSK has decided to apply for a GRS certification covering its own business.
How has recent business been?
Speaking of JYSK Ireland & UK business development we can say that despite difficult economic conditions witnessed in both markets, we have continued to grow against market trends in furniture sector. The trends we are seeing include customers being more conservative on spending, but household furnishing and decorating has not suffered significantly in our range despite cost-of-living crisis going on. Customers continue to invest in their homes and with social media playing a huge part in our every day lives, we’re becoming more house proud then every before.
What challenges do you currently face?
As mentioned, economic climate combined with record low consumer confidence is challenging for any business not just retail sector, but we’ve managed to keep our costs under control and our customers continue to see our assortment and great offers added value to their household and garden needs.
On the other hand, record low unemployment rates and extremely tight labour market has clearly made situation favorable to employees who are more often and easily changing employees/careers. With fast growing business and high need of new hirings all the time this has and will keep us close to our vision statement ‘to be employees’ first choice within retail’. Our focus and actions are constantly tight on attracting new employees and foremost developing our talents by offering great career opportunities combined with competitive compensation and benefit packages in place.
Do you have any staff you would like to pay special thanks or recognition to and why?
We are very international and multinational company in general, but this is particularly true with my own country management team that includes myself being Finnish, Anastasiia Kruta (HR Manager) from Ukraine, Reza Rahimi (Retail Manager) from Sweden and Eithne Trehy (Financial Manager) representing Ireland in our team. This richness of cultural backgrounds and experience from various markets has for sure been an advantage when embedding the JYSK cultural in Ireland and UK and building our business from zero to 30 UK stores and 21 in ROI. I couldn’t be more proud of the committed and hardworking team we’ve built.
Why do you think customers choose your business?
If I could summarize the success formula, I would say it consists following elements:
- We have a strong assortment of Scandinavian sleeping and living that is constantly assessed and kept fresh with latest trends and customer expectations.
- We have all the time great offers across our assortment to make sure we exceed expectations both on quality and in pricing
- We have a strong retail concept that flows through more than 3,300 JYSK stores across globe.
- We want to be close to our customers. When establishing our business in Ireland I used to say that there is no city too small for JYSK and we’ve opened stores in small cities such as Youghal in county Cork with a population of less than 10,000 to big cities such as Manchester, England.
