Colombier is a family-owned company whose legacy business is converting paper and board. With investments from Taaleri Bioindustry Fund I, Colombier has begun to enter the ecological packaging market with their recyclable paper-based materials offering an alternative to plastic packaging. Trailmaker helped Colombier turn their goals into actionable steps and set their market entry in motion.
Colombier aims to grow into a significant operator in ecological packaging products. This means building an entirely new market that differs substantially from its legacy business.
“With the ecological packaging solutions, we are delivering products that are much more technical and dealing with a more complex target market than in our legacy business. To grow in the new market, we needed a new approach”, Colombier Group’s CEO, Juha Viitala, says.
Colombier started the market entry as an internal project, but they soon realized that outside help was needed to hasten the process.
“Like everybody else we have limited resources, and our key people have many responsibilities. In these circumstances, strategic development tends to be overshadowed by operational priorities.”
Taaleri Bioindustry Fund I is co-financing Colombier’s scale-up phase. According to Investment Director Pasi Tyyvi, Colombier was faced with the same challenges that all start-ups and scale-ups go through.
“It’s an intense phase where they need to simultaneously scale up and optimize their production, create a market for their products, and find clients and build relationships with them.”
Trailmaker was brought in to help boost the entry by adding structure and creating a timeline for the process.
By working with Trailmaker, Colombier was able to achieve a common view of their goals and priorities as well as breaking them down into actionable steps. This helped Colombier achieve the momentum needed.
“The Trailmaker process helped us set things in motion. We were able to realize the steps we needed to take and increase our internal execution power”, Viitala says.
According to Viitala, since the Trailmaker process Colombier has continued on the same path independently.
“It wasn’t just a classroom experiment for us. We have taken the lessons we got from the Trailmaker process and implemented them into our internal processes.”
