MILAN — When seasoned luxury executive Daniel Lalonde left Flos B&B Italia Group to become chief executive officer of Vita last year, he took on an extensive portfolio of heritage brands and centuries of design history.
Vita is part of Finland’s Fiskars Group and includes some of the oldest names in tableware and design: Royal Copenhagen, founded in 1775 under the patronage of Queen Juliane Marie; Georg Jensen, established in Copenhagen in 1904 by Georg Jensen, a former goldsmith’s apprentice and sculptor; Iittala, which began as a glass factory in 1881; Rörstrand, a tableware brand founded in the Swedish castle of Rörstrand in Stockholm in 1726; Wedgwood, founded in Burslem, England, in 1759 (which is also home to Royal Albert), and Waterford, launched by the Penrose family in Ireland in 1783.
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On a global basis, Lalonde said the storytelling around these brands has been relatively undertold.
“There’s just tremendous potential. I think that’s why, as an industry, we haven’t grown that much. I think we could all tell much more compelling stories about that because that matters,” he told WWD.
At the heart of Lalonde’s strategy is stronger storytelling, attracting younger consumers through creativity, innovation, launches and cutting-edge collaborations, and expanding both Vita’s market share and the category overall. Vita is a leader in high-end homeware, boasting about 15 to 18 percent of the overall high-end homeware market, which Lalonde said is worth an estimated 6 billion euros. That market includes tableware, home decor, cutlery and glassware.
“It’s too small, I want to make this pie bigger,” he said, adding that as Vita builds the appeal of its 12 brands among younger consumers, it also hopes to help grow the broader category.
Financial Targets and Owning 3daysofdesign
The company is targeting annual net sales growth of 4 percent to 6 percent through 2030. In 2025, Vita booked 613.2 million euros in total sales. Comparable earnings before interest and taxes as a percentage of sales fell to 4.5 percent, affected by low volumes and inventory-reduction actions. Lalonde aims to grow that figure to 12 percent by 2030. The last three positive like-for-like quarters were third-quarter 2025, fourth-quarter 2025 and fourth-quarter 2026.
A pivotal moment for Vita is 3daysofdesign in Copenhagen, which runs June 10 to 12, where the firm will stage four major events.
“We want to own 3daysofdesign,” he said.
Iittala will host “Step Inside an Icon,” an exhibit in which guests will be able to step inside a towering version of Finnish designer Alvar Aalto’s famed vase. During the event, it will launch a new “city” edition, still mouth-blown.
Georg Jensen creative director Paula Gerbase has conceived an interactive exhibition called “At Play,” which incorporates games made in silver, including the King’s Game, a Danish classic. Royal Copenhagen will launch the “Triton” collection in collaboration with the Griegst family, the Danish dynasty of artists, goldsmiths and designers behind the cult avant-garde jewelry and fine art brand of the same name. Waterford will stage an immersive brand experience celebrating craftsmanship and Irish hospitality, anchored by a classic Irish bar, while Wedgwood will unfurl its own immersive experience dedicated to prestige and craft.
Georg Jensen, whose sales are divided equally between jewelry and home, is Vita’s largest brand by sales, accounting for 24 percent of the total, while tableware remains the company’s biggest category at 37 percent.
“It’s my fastest-growing brand today. It’s my biggest brand today,” he said.
The Quest for New Icons
Vita’s roster of creative directors includes Gerbase, Jasper Toron Nielsen at Royal Copenhagen, Emma Glynn at Wedgwood, Hus Mozaffar (formerly at Ralph Lauren Home) at Waterford, Janni Vepsäläinen for Iittala and Annika Tickle who is at the forefront of Rörstrand, Arabia and Moomin Arabia.
Gerbase, a Brazil-born, Switzerland-raised designer who served as artistic director of John Lobb between 2014 and 2020, has been working to attract both heritage and younger audiences with new concepts like her jewelry collection named Weft, which embraces weaving as its starting point.
Toron Nielsen joined Royal Copenhagen in 2023 after senior design roles at Burberry, Givenchy, Brioni and Tom Ford. In this new chapter, Toron Nielsen has worked to make the heritage brand more convivial and more in tune with modern life. He has expanded the brand’s scope with design-forward collections such as Kontur, which captures the ocean’s beauty in sculptural, contemporary forms and includes a lamp, vase and accessories plate. He also forged a collaboration with Danish artist Klara Lilja, whose three-dimensional sculptures of wild flora and fauna turned the brand’s plates into works of art.
When the brand launched its Iris collection in March, the aim was to create the basis for mix-and-match styling within the realm of classic Royal Copenhagen designs.
“Iris invites one to play and make the table their own. For me, it’s about creating porcelain that fits into life as it really is — personal, expressive and full of small moments that matter,” Toron Nielsen said at the time.
Reorganization, Restructuring
Expanding tableware brands like these, at a time when enthusiasm for traditional dining and wedding registries has waned, is an uphill climb, Lalonde agreed.
Preparing for growth has not come easy. Iittala and its parent company, Fiskars Group, have experienced multiple rounds of restructuring and production cuts. Most recently, in February, Fiskars revealed a global reorganization of its Vita business area, which includes Iittala, with a net reduction of about 310 roles worldwide.
Lalonde contended that the layoffs were part of a broader reorganization aimed at streamlining the company, with cuts split roughly equally between office and manufacturing roles.
“The main goal for me was simplifying the organization structure, setting up in such a way that it’s brand-led.”
Over the past year, Lalonde has reorganized the business into three brand houses: the House of Danish Design Icons, the House of Nordic Design Living and the House of British and Irish Design.
During his tenure at Flos B&B Italia Group, Lalonde rose to the fore for shaping the firm as the “LVMH of home” and led the company through a new era of expansion and rebranding. Before joining what was then known as Design Holding in 2021, Lalonde was CEO at SMCP, the group behind accessible fashion labels Sandro, Maje, Claudie Pierlot and Fursac. He has also been international president of Ralph Lauren International and held various positions at LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton including president and CEO of Louis Vuitton North America.
Pioneering New Markets
In terms of markets, Japan and the Nordics are among Vita’s top geographic areas, though the firm is also eyeing white-space growth opportunities in Spain, Southeast Asia, France and Italy. It is focused on growth in the U.S. through online channels, as the department store landscape continues to shrink while e-commerce remains a bright spot.
“The U.S. is only 10 percent of our business and can be much larger and will be in the future as well.”
In India, the firm is focused on working with local partners.
In the Middle East, Vita has a partnership with the Chalhoub Group and said the region could become meaningful for both direct-to-consumer and business-to-business projects once the Iran war subsides and traffic returns to more normal levels.
As with many design companies that struggle to create new icons in an industry still heavily tethered to Art Deco and midcentury masters, Lalonde said he is committed to building new ones through the creative directors working across its six core brands — Iittala, Georg Jensen, Wedgwood, Waterford, Royal Copenhagen and Finnish brand Moomin Arabia. To support that push, the company has signed collaborations with well-known global designers.
“What’s the new Aalto” is one of the questions driving the company, he said, with “world-class designers and architects” helping “develop the new icons for the future.”