Sweden is seeing a rise in successful e-commerce startups like Tictail and Fyndiq, which makes sense considering the country’s retail success with giants like Ikea and H&M. To support the next wave of companies, a new center for e-commerce stores has opened next to Sweden’s second-largest container port in Helsingborg.
“Having the option of unloading containers directly at the warehouses makes the location in Helsingborg great. This together with the city’s location, being right between Denmark and Sweden, makes it one of the best locations in the Nordics”, says Karsten Deppert, co-founder of the initatave and founder of our publishing partner, Øresund Startups.
In practice this means that they’ve acquired a massive 2,000 sqm of office space and a 5,000 sqm warehouse in the former headquarters of Kemira, the finnish chemical giant that moved its Helsingborg operations back to Finland. Like any other coworking space the idea is to promote flexibility to growing companies, who can rent warehouse space on a per-square meter basis, giving a good solution for traditional e-commerce stores and those who run on a large seasonal sales cycle.
Additionally Deppert and co-founder Dan Nilsson are hoping to promote good knowledge sharing between companies operating in the park. Nilsson is an e-commerce veteran in his own right, having started or invested in over 20 e-commerce companies incliding Fyndiq and Alphageek.
“Our aim is to create an open and sharing environment. E-commerce has the unique advantage of having a lot of problems in common, but every store having their own, specific, audience. This makes it easy share know-how and best practices between companies, without them being direct competitors”, says Amelie Lidén, office manager.
It will be interesting to see how E-Commerce Park fills its hallways and warehouses – whether they’ll be able to pull in existing small and medium sized players, or whether entrepreneurs setting up new opportunities will open doors.
More information can be found in their website.
