Furniture and furnishings market

A supra-region­al fur­ni­ture and fur­nish­ings busi­ness in the pre­mi­um seg­ment closed its doors in 2016 after almost 40 years of oper­a­tion due to the fierce­ly com­pet­i­tive mar­ket dri­ven by cur­ren­cy fac­tors and chang­ing cus­tomer behav­iour. Since the well-cap­i­talised com­pa­ny changed its busi­ness pur­pose and did not go bank­rupt, it was nec­es­sary to care­ful­ly com­mu­ni­cate to the var­i­ous stake­hold­ers the argu­ment for the clo­sure of the tra­di­tion­al busi­ness and the asso­ci­at­ed relo­ca­tion of staff.

To achieve this aim, cometris AG pro­vid­ed strate­gic advice to the Board of Man­age­ment and the Board of Direc­tors and draft­ed a com­pre­hen­sive com­mu­ni­ca­tion plan. Build­ing on this, cometris AG draft­ed per­son­alised let­ters for sev­er­al thou­sand cus­tomers, as well as for sup­pli­ers and oth­er key con­tacts. Lan­guage rules for staff infor­ma­tion, a media release and a detailed Q&A cat­a­logue for media enquiries also played an impor­tant role in mak­ing sure that the clo­sure of the busi­ness was seen in the right light, no ques­tions remained unan­swered, and regret was also tem­pered with a degree of pos­i­tive feedback.