Dear all Norrøna friends!
I really hope everyone has had a relaxing holiday with family and friends, maybe also with time to enjoy the outdoors. In these unpredictable and uncertain times, I find the outdoors to be a place for stability and mindfulness.
Our vision “Welcome to nature” is about inspiring everyone to spend more time out in nature.
We do this by creating products that hopefully make it comfortable for you to be outside no matter what kind of weather. To fulfill our vision, we are continually broadening our travel adventure offerings with the Norrøna Hvitserk travel organization. We have just bought the international travel part of Hvitserk which offers boutique travel opportunities to more than 50 locations, and we will shortly announce the first Norrøna Lodge.
We have also organized a lot of events in our retail stores and in nature for all of our users throughout 2022, and we will continue and develop even more events in 2023 and hope you will find the time to join some interesting events.
We have created content that we hope will inspire you to get out and enjoy nature. This year we launched the Flow issue of Norrøna Magazine and new editions will come in 2023. We started a podcast series this summer, and created several new films. All to give you different perspectives on outdoor lifestyle.
On the product side, we are launching both new collections and product groups in 2023. This spring, we will launch our new trail running collection, senja. This is a new segment for us and it will be interesting to see how you like these products. We are also reintroducing tents – with a range of both tunnel and dome tents, all made with recycled materials. Norrøna made great tents from the end of the 30’s up to 1994, and it has been very exciting to bring this product group back.
Our ambassadors are an important part of our extreme user development program. They test our products and give us feedback and direction on what needs to be improved and what new products to make. Our current group of ambassadors is a team that we are really proud of, and we’re excited to announce that we will be welcoming 10 new members to our team in 2023.
An important part of our vision “Welcome to nature” is to preserve nature and do what we can to build a business that does as little harm as possible to the environment. As there is little time for humanity to change the way we live, I believe that Norrøna can be in the forefront of changing the way we do business and inspire others to do the same. Building products with the highest possible quality with a timeless design and offering repair services is the first building block of Norrøna. This is even more important today than when we were founded in 1929. We ran a competition this year to find the oldest Norrøna products in use and the winner was a backpack from the 1930’s still in use. We often receive many products 20 to 40 years old for repairs. All of this makes me really proud. We have been building more service centers this year, one in our new Flagship store in Munich, and our repair lead time is 6 days. A record low.
We work hard with our 2029 responsibility roadmap to find the materials with the lowest environmental footprint and highest quality. We measure our total carbon footprint for the whole value chain. We have been measuring the entire company’s carbon footprint from 2020, and are getting better with the data. The average carbon footprint of a Norrøna product was 7,3 Kg in 2021. We still believe there is more work to be done with the data. Though it gives us an indication of our footprint, and we see the areas where we need to reduce. Examples of actions we have started in 2022 to reduce our carbon footprint is creating a travel carbon budget for 2023, so each Norrøna employee must manage travel within this budget. We are shifting the energy at our factory to use more renewable energy, reducing the use of packaging, changing fabric and trims to use more recycled materials and working with the energy source at the factories we produce at. There have been obstacles. We had some fall back when we needed to ship a lot more products with air than planned because of big delays.
In 2022, we initiated a zero waste plan to stop sending waste to landfills in our operations. Some examples of the actions we’re taking to reach this goal include reducing packaging, opening a second hand store in 2023, and making products from leftover materials that we sell in our outlets.
Transparency is another important element of our responsibility roadmap and we will put out a lot more information linked to the factories where we manufacture our products. An example of this was published late fall of 2022 showing more information on all products made at the Norrrøna factory, and we will show all the factories we manufacture in the same way in 2023.
You, together with the Norrøna team are what makes Norrøna a strong brand. We will continue to work very hard to give you great products and a fantastic customer experience in the year to come. Our customer service is open from CET 07-23 everyday and 13-21 on weekends. We had our best year in response time and we will work to be even quicker in 2023. If you have any questions or complaints, we will be there to help you by phone, chat or email quickly.
I thank you for 2022 and wish you Happy New Year from the whole Norrøna team.
Best regards
Jørgen Jørgensen
4th generation owner and leader of Norrøna
5 thoughts on “Note from the CEO”
Thank you for communicating and behaving as an exemplary brand should.
Thank you Scott!
In an age when we are overwhelmed by planned obsolescence across Retail it is exceptional to see Norrona maintain a vision that embraces value, durability and timeless design with its products. It’s one of biggest reasons I’m a customer and advocate of your brand. Thank you for having such a responsible and progressive approach! Happy New Year 2023!
Thank you very much, Steve, and Happy New Year.
“Thank you”.