Scan Magazine | Design Profile | Solamagic Scandinavia
Danish eventing rider of the year (2017), Cecilie Eriksen, uses Solamagic’s AniMA® technology with infrared heat to keep her horse Calvin comfortable and injury free.
Heating up the market In less than seven years, Solamagic Scandinavia has gone from a yearly turnover of less than 400,000 DKK (46,000 GBP) to a turnover close to 100 million. Peter van A. Bjerke, the CEO behind the success, tells Scan Magazine how he turned the company into a market leader within electric, energy-efficient outdoor heating, and why he thinks the newly developed AniMA® technology – heating for horses – is the next big step. By Signe Hansen | Photos: Solamagic
“Basically, what we have done, and what has been incremental to our success, is that we, as the first company to do so, went into the market and took on the responsibility of structuring it and making it navigable for the customers,” explains Bjerke, who as part of the Zeetec Technology group took over Solamagic and created Solamagic Scandinavia at the beginning of 2013. While broadening the company’s customer base from the hotel and restaurant 6 | Issue 122 | March 2019
industry to private retail, the 50-year-old business generator used his many years of experience of working with long-term client relationships to build a different approach to the market, one that has turned out to be hugely successful. “Our successful start in Solamagic was definitely furthered by our industrial background – there’s a big difference, in that in industrial client relationships you work on creating long-term benefits for all partners, and that’s the approach we took with us into Solamagic,” says Bjerke.
Turning around a bad image With a background in Roxtec, one of the fastest-growing industrial companies in Europe, Bjerke’s approach to business management and result generation has not been pulled out of the blue. Taking over a company that already produced high-quality products, his main ambition was to make sure that the qualities became better known to the customer base. “When taking over, we sat down and looked at why people’s perception of electrical heating lamps was as far from the reality as it was. Generally speaking, people thought of electrical outdoor heaters as an incredibly energyconsuming product with little effect, and hence, most hotels and restaurants chose gas solutions. It’s a mentality that we’ve all been brought up with – that heating through gas or oil is good and heating through electricity is bad.”