Leading Through Innovation: How Fortune Brands is Shaping the Future of Home
One of the toughest challenges for a successful company is transitioning from the practices that drove its initial success to new strategies that will sustain and expand its achievements. This shift involves risks and costs, but it can be a valuable investment if executed well.
When Fortune Brands Innovations decided to divest an iconic cabinetry brand, CEO Nick Fink faced some nervous moments. However, this move and the subsequent changes have enabled Fortune Brands to broaden their product range, creating a more diverse impact on our homes. They chose to concentrate on their core strengths and target the segments of the home market they believed held the most promise.
In the latest episode of The New Home Insights podcast, Nick joined me to discuss this transformation, his personal journey, and to provide insights into Fortune Brands’ strategies, goals, values, and commitment to leveraging technology and data.
According to John Burns,
Brand is so vital to Fortune they put it in their name
- Brand is what separates a consumer-based company from its competition. Having a brand that consumers demand can build a “moat” around your business that protects your market share.
- For Fortune Brands, the best way to build that moat is through innovation, but you can get an assist by focusing on the consumer spaces with the brightest future. So, Fortune concentrates on brands that have great name recognition and are hard to replace, but also brands in spaces with tailwinds that can propel growth.
Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to waste
- Perhaps one of the most iconic brands within the Fortune family is Moen. These days, Moen is much more than just faucets. It has become the centerpiece of Fortune’s leadership in all things water management. It is the core of a smart water network.
- Nick argues that “the big evolution for that business over the last few years has been to move from being a faucet and showerhead leader to really being a whole-home residential water management company.”
- Sustainability is another big part of how Fortune Brands impacts water and beyond. Conservation and efficiency are guiding principles for their fixtures and water systems.
- Luxury is another way to build a moat, a market niche where brand is often paramount. Under the umbrella of the House of Rohl, Fortune has a collection of high-end kitchen and bath brands, including Rohl, Shaws, Victoria + Albert, Perrin & Rowe, and Riobel. To show how low-class I am, I have never heard of any of those things, but I bet they are awesome. I am going to have to get more rich friends.
Indoors and outdoors
- Fortune’s kitchen and bath brands impact your home’s interior, but they are also a big part of the outside of the home, mainly through doors and decks.
- Therma-Tru I have heard of. It is one of the leading door manufacturers in the industry and is at the forefront of changing material design. “Therma-Tru…is our leading builder brand….It’s because the performance is so much greater that it actually creates more value for the builder.”
- Larson specializes in storm and screen doors, and Fiberon is one of the top decking brands in the world. It is all part of that indoor-outdoor connectivity, a trend that Covid kicked into high gear and appears to have staying power.
- “What we saw with a brand like Larson…was what a storm or screen door does today is less about insulation…but it’s about having that light or air experience in your house.”
- And then there is security. That has always been at the top of the agenda for most homeowners. With Master Lock and now Yale, Fortune has a lock on locks (I can’t believe that got through editing). With SentrySafe, Fortune helps keep you safe. “Being able to give permission or remove permission for someone to access your home, to know when someone accessed your home…is very powerful.”
