Homeenter Wins With More Clubs

On the walls of Homeenter's conference room, a row of magazines with music stars on the covers line the walls. Some four decades of hairstyles give a strong sense of the soul of Homeenter, which opened in 1973 as the Scandinavian Music Club. "We started with music," says Henrik Hjorth, CEO of Homeenter, which is what the company has been called since 2006. "Our first big star was Bruce Springsteen - before he was so popular."

While the mail-order company still offers club members a wide range of music - including Bruce Springsteen - like the hairstyles on the wall, the name has changed over the years in order to reflect changes in what the company offers.

"In 1994, we became Scandinavian Home Entertainment, since we were no longer just selling music but also films and games," says Hjorth. "Then in 2002 we changed the name to Home Entertainment, since we were no longer just in Scandinavia but in Finland as well."

The latest name change, to Homeenter, reflects a much broader perspective and a new way of thinking about what the company offers. "With the music industry in transformation and people consuming music in different ways, we realized we needed to think outside the box," says Hjorth. "Or more accurately, we needed to think about the box itself -the post box that is."

What Homeenter did was focus on the fact that it had a strong membership base - some 650,000 members across the Nordic countries - which already gave it entry to people's homes, hence the name. The only limitation was the size of the product, which needed to be able to fit into the mail slots in customers' doors.

"We realized we had a large group of loyal customers who had a broad range of interests outside of just music and film," Hjorth says. Like crafts, for example. Homeenter's craft club - Skaparklubben - which is aimed at kids as well as adults who are interested in craft projects of all sorts, has been a big hit in Finland, says Hjorth. And Club choklad, which sends a chocolate-of-the-month selection to members, has been particularly popular in Denmark.

All in all, Homeenter has eight different clubs - along with the chocolate and crafts clubs, there are Filmclub, Musicclub, Barnens Filmklubb with films for kids, Club Kaffe for coffee and Club Chic for jewelry. Homeenter also owns Discshop, which sells films and computer games in Sweden and Finland.

"We encourage our employees to come up with ideas for clubs that they would be interested in, as long as it fit the size of the postal-regulation-sized boxes we use," Hjorth says. So the ideas are endless. "Who knows what we'll come out with next!"