Posti and Finnish Design Shop are working together to ensure that the journey of products ordered from the online store results in the lowest emissions possible. When a parcel from the Finnish Design Shop’s warehouse is shipped to the customer, sustainability is taken into account in multiple ways.
photo: Suvi Kesäläinen
Finnish Design Shop is one of the biggest Nordic design online stores in the world, delivering products of more than 300 brands to more than 180 countries.
Finnish Design Shop and Posti are working to reduce the emissions resulting from the journey of online purchases as much as possible. Sustainability is already considered long before the parcel is loaded for delivery.
The heart of Finnish Design Shop’s online store is a new 12,000-square-meter building in Turku, which houses the company’s logistics center, head office, showroom and restaurant. The entire facility has been designed and built in accordance with the Excellent-level standards of the BREEAM classification system for a sustainable built environment.
“Simply put, this means that, with regard to the building, attention has been paid to things such as the selection of materials that produce the least emissions possible, the use of energy and water and the impact to the surrounding environment. Concrete examples include the geothermal wells and the solar panels on the roof of the building,” says Kalle Karvanen, Director of Logistics at Finnish Design Shop.
Carefully curated, responsible products
Circular economy and the long lifecycle of products are at the core of Finnish Design Shop’s operations. The product range of the online store is carefully curated – the products must be durable and stand the test of time, both in terms of quality and esthetics.
In 2023, the company introduced its own Product Sustainability Framework, which helps customers make more sustainable choices. It allows Finnish Design Shop to assess the extent to which its products meet the sustainability criteria and give products their individual sustainability ratings, which are also visible to customers on the product pages.
“We haven’t previously had a sustainability assessment tool tailored for design products in our industry. In practice, the ratings on our site provide consumers with information for comparing the sustainability of different products,” says Karvanen.
Circular economy thinking is also an important part of Finnish Design Shop’s operations, which means that every design product gets the long lifecycle it deserves. One part of this is the second-hand design marketplace, Franckly.com, through which consumers can extend the lifecycle of a product by selling it to other consumers.
The automated warehouse saves energy and improves efficiency
Part of the Finnish Design Shop’s logistics center is for shelf storage and part for energy-efficient automatic warehousing. The automated warehouse has tens of thousands of product shelves, where 15 robots transport the products onto conveyors and finally to the shipping units of different transporters. The robots working at the automated warehouse require very little electricity to run.
“If we had the same amount of goods on the shelf and transported it with traditional forklifts, it would consume significantly more electricity and take up more resources,” says Karvanen.
Warehouse automation makes operations more efficient and enables the company to meet the growth of e-commerce. According to Karvanen, automation also helps improve occupational safety, which is already at a good level at the carefully designed, modern logistics center.
“If we manually moved boxes with forklifts through corridors with people, there’s always be a risk that something could happen.”
Ecological solutions, such as cardboard and paper, are preferred in packaging solutions and materials, as they are easy for the customer to recycle. Customers want to get their products delivered intact while avoiding overpackaging.
“From the environmental perspective, the biggest load would result from having to ship the same product twice in case it breaks during delivery,” says Karvanen.
Toward low-emissions transport through logistics partnership
From the logistics center, the products continue their journey to the customers. Many customers also pick up their orders at the pickup point connected to the showroom, which they visit even if they have to travel long distances.
“The pickup point has turned out to be surprisingly popular. For example, we have customers from the capital region come to pick up their orders just so that they can get to see this building and enjoy what our restaurant has to offer,” says Karvanen.
Depending on the season and campaigns, thousands of parcels and pallets leave the logistics center every day. Finnish Design Shop and Posti are working together to ensure that the journey of products ordered from the online store to the customer results in the lowest emissions possible.
Finnish Design Shop carries out annual, comprehensive carbon footprint calculations for its own operations and bears its responsibility for its climate impact.
“Since 2021, we have offset our own share of the emissions by purchasing Finnish forest that will remain in its natural state. We do this annually along with all our other sustainability work,” says Karvanen.
For Finnish Design Shop, it’s important that the logistics partners also set ambitious sustainability targets for themselves. Posti’s goal for 2030 is that all transports are made using fossil-free energy. Already in 2022, Posti’s vehicles drove more than 20 million kilometers fossil-free, and an increasing share of transports are now powered by electricity, renewable diesel or biogas – and also green hydrogen in the future.