BIG INTERVIEW ‘Buy and build’ has been Wulff’s mantra for decades. Doubling its sales with the addition of Staples Finland last year was just the beginning of a concerted M&A strategy, says CEO Elina Pienimäki
FLYING THE
Nordic flag W
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ulff Group is a publicly listed company – the only one in our industry in the Nordics. As such, it’s not difficult to get a broad overview of this Finland-based reseller that has been in existence for over 130 years. What’s much harder to find is a real insight into this B2B player which, since 2019, has been woman-led and in May 2021 caused a stir when it bought Staples Solutions’ Finnish operations for what seemed like a bargain price. OPI’s Heike Dieckmann had a rare – and very welcome – opportunity to speak to Wulff CEO Elina Pienimäki and get that insight.
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OPI: Some of our readers may recognise you from a previous stint at Wulff a few years ago. Tell me a bit about your background before you rejoined as CEO in September 2019? Elina Pienimäki: Sure. Before I took over as Wulff Group CEO, I was leading a company called Aallon Group which is a financial services provider in Finland. My CEO role there was focused on building a new group of companies in that industry, mainly through M&A. While I was there, we also took the group through an IPO. The firm has been growing very nicely ever since. Prior to this, I worked as CFO for an organisation called Ahlsell Finland. The parent company is Swedish and a distributor of technical tools and supplies for the construction space. It’s quite well known in the Nordics. As you mentioned, I was at Wulff in the past – from 2014 to 2017 as CFO – so I knew the firm, many of its people and its culture well when I rejoined. It was an easy decision to go back. Although it’s a public company, it’s a very family-orientated enterprise – it’s also agile and M&A focused, both factors that really appealed to me.
OPI: What did you find when you joined, just a few months before COVID hit? EP: Wulff is hugely sales driven and had put considerable efforts into expanding its product and service range in the prior years through a strategic project called the Wulff Lab. Everything the company did had to contribute directly to sales growth and profitability. Cleaning and healthcare products were a big part of that category expansion – as were, on a side note, sustainability items. With the former in mind, we were incredibly well placed when in 2020 the pandemic really kicked off. We had the products, relationships with the channels to buy from and the organisational capabilities to make it all work – quickly. OPI: Did that category include PPE? EP: Yes, we were pretty well equipped in this area too. Of course, there were challenges and we had to adapt, finding even more new channels of buying and sourcing these products. But it benefitted us that we had a strategy as regards category expansion well before COVID. We’d been building our assortment outside the office supplies segment for some time, so we were in a good place. In fact, rather than limiting ourselves in any way, we refer to Wulff as a Nordic multichannel sales company for a wide
