Kekkilä Garden
The versatile Creative Garden product family brings joy for urban gardeners
Kekkilä, founded in 1924, is a market leader in home gardening and landscaping both in Finland and Sweden. Their consumer brand Kekkilä Garden had for some time now seen a business opportunity in the growing trend of home gardening.
By researching the latent consumer needs and desires of Swedes and Finns, we discovered that ever younger and urban people desire green elements around them. Kekkilä wants to boost ‘green design’ and make the creation of green spaces easy for all of their customers.
Kekkilä presented us with the tough challenge of tapping into the aspirations of home gardeners and conceptualizing them into a suitable solution.
Approach
The starting point of the design process were consumer perceptions. Our team combined user-centric insights with agile methods and opportunity prototyping and managed to identify a gap between what people wanted to grow on their balconies and what was currently available on the market.
People want to enjoy their small outdoor spaces while growing edibles and flowers, especially in glazed spaces where gardening is possible throughout the year. Unfortunately, home gardeners felt that the current offering on the market was limited: the lack of suitable lighting features and versatile plant furniture were the biggest barriers to purchase.
Result
The brand new Kekkilä Creative Garden products gave form to the validated user needs. The product family consists of seven unique pieces for small homes that work just as well individually as together, indoor as outdoor.
The Creative Garden products are designed for year-round use. The well-being of plants was the starting point in the design and no compromises were made in the elegant, simple and functional design of the products.
At Pentagon Design, we also told the brand story of the product portfolio in order to demonstrate how the products serve as a source of joy in urban gardening. All the Creative Garden products are available at the Kekkilä online store.
The lack of proper lighting and the scarcity of modular furniture were the greatest barriers in purchasing garden furniture. Current solutions were simply not meeting the needs.
”The Creative Garden products have exceeded our expectations! Even before marketing had kicked off properly, product sales had started nicely in our online store. Also, the growth in our global business has been a delight.”
–Nina Kinnunen, Brand & Communications Director at Kekkilä Group
