HÄSTENS
CASE STUDY
CHALLENGE
In 1852, Hästens, a Swedish family-owned entreprise, decided to take on the challenge of creating the world’s best sleep experience. Today, at its factory in Köping, Sweden, skillful craftsmen still practice the craft of bedmaking using only premium natural materials and ancestral techniques perfected over five generations. Still a family-owned business, Hästens appointed IC Insight Communications to handle its press and public relations activities in France, with the objective of further increasing brand awareness and knowledge, visibility, and word-of-mouth in the French media landscape.
OUR WORK
For the worldwide launch of Hästens’s most high-end model, the Grand Vividus, we developed and implemented a communications campaign and event concept in September 2020, during Paris Design Week. The Grand Vividus, a true masterpiece and perhaps the best bed in the world, was exhibited inside one of Paris’s most prominent contemporary art galleries among showcased paintings and sculptures, to underscore the ties that can be established between this fine example of Hästens’s outstanding craftsmanship, and true art.
Our core strength resides in our unique multidisciplinary approach to each client project. We are able to introduce key editors from widely different specialties – namely design, lifestyle, wellness, and health – to our clients in order to create or reinforce a connection between our client’s activity and its relevance to different disciplines. Applying our distinctive approach, we connected key editors from a range of disciplines to the universe of Hästens and secured engaging brand sagas from a variety of editorial angles. We also organized, at different times throughout the year, press trips to Köping for tours of Hästens’s headquarters and its “dream factory,” a state-of-the-art manufacture where our select editors met with key brand representatives and could see close up the processes that make up Hästens’s superior craftsmanship.
Our key objectives were two-fold: first, to promote Hästens’s heritage, technical know-how and core values as an undisputed leader in its own field and as the top choice of interior designers, architects and high-end consumers, and second, to strengthen the relationship of the brand with key editors and influencers.
More recently, we accompanied the launch of Hästens’s innovative app, “Restore,” which has helped to propel the company’s 168-year-old expertise into the digital world. We implemented a 360° multi-disciplinary PR campaign focusing on digital media which brought together editors from both health and technology.
RESULTS
Our campaigns have been highly productive, generating ongoing prominent features about Hästens in leading French publications, ranging from dailies, weeklies and lifestyle media including Les Echos Série Limitée, Les Echos Week-End, M le magazine du Monde, Ideat, Architectural Design, Madame Figaro, Elle Décoration, among others. Our continuous collaboration with Hästens’s in-house communications team and its European management has ensured a seamless and cohesive communication program that has produced high-end visibility for the brand.
Our efforts have resulted in successfully promoting the name, core values and universe of Hästens. The increased awareness generated by the placement of rich and meaningful storytelling in high-profile publications has already driven product sales in the French market, and all its product catalogues are now exhausted in France. Our collaboration with the company was so fruitful that starting in 2021, IC Insight Communications has been asked to handle, in addition to France, PR and communication for Hästens in the Italian market.
