Home & sleep · Sweden + Denmark + Norway + Finland · Scale tier
Nordic Bedding Co.
approx. SEK 240M revenue, 34 staff
“We needed a competitive intelligence function. We didn't need to hire one. MarketWatch is what we used to think of as a four-person team, except the four-person team gets up earlier and writes better.”
The problem
Nordic Bedding had two private-equity-backed competitors and a fast-growing IKEA-adjacent challenger eating into their entry-tier price points. Their commercial team was frustrated — sales were declining 3-4% YoY despite a strong brand, and they could not pin the cause. The board wanted a quarterly competitive review they trusted; the existing function did not exist.
The engagement
Scale-tier engagement, with Iris Vong personally writing the editorial review for the first 90 days. Twelve competitors configured across four sub-categories (duvets, pillows, sheets, accessories). Custom rule weights to emphasise the entry-tier price band where the bleed was happening. White-label digest delivered into the board portal monthly; weekly Compass brief to the commercial team.
Results
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Time-to-detect a competitor's hero-SKU promotion | median 11 days | median 6 hours |
| Quarterly board competitive review | did not exist | delivered in 11 of 11 quarters since |
| YoY sales trajectory (entry-tier band) | -3.8% | +2.1% (Q1 2026 vs Q1 2025) |
| Internal CI staffing | 0 (open req) | 0 (req closed — engagement covers) |
In their words
When Astrid first briefed us, the conversation took an hour and we spent fifty minutes of it on what "good" would look like. She did not want a tool. She wanted a function. The Scale tier exists because that is a real difference: Iris's team write the first three months of briefs by hand, the customer's voice and category nuance get encoded into the system prompt, and only then does Compass take over the cadence.
By the end of the first quarter we had identified two specific patterns Nordic Bedding had not seen. The first was a quarterly hero-SKU promotion from their largest competitor that consistently launched on the second Tuesday of the quarter. The second was a slow but visible drift in social sentiment that mapped to a specific quality complaint about pillowcase stitching — a manufacturing change at a specific factory we could date-correlate. Both were actionable; both unlocked board-level decisions.
Nordic Bedding's entry-tier sales returned to growth in Q1 2026. Astrid is careful to say the engagement was not the only reason — they also adjusted production allocation and re-shot photography for that band. But the brief gave them the evidence to make those decisions confidently, and the brief is what the board reads.