Behind the newly launched company Kolsyra.se is Maximilian Novak, a well-known name to those who follow cross-country skiing. Having recently finished the ski season, he is now expanding his career.
In the new e-commerce company, he takes on the roles of both Chairman of the Board and CEO. He draws clear parallels between his sporting career and his new everyday life as a company builder, where the drive to optimize and save time has been central to wanting to develop the new service.
As an elite athlete and as a person, I am allergic to inefficiency and always try to scale back unnecessary steps. I drink a lot of sparkling water at home and have always found it cumbersome to change cartridges, which I think many people can relate to, says Max Novak.
The Trio Driving the Company
Max Novak is not making the journey alone, however. By his side, he has two co-founders who also take a seat on the company's board. Kate Björk Öhrfelt joins as Head of Marketing and Pontus Endre steps into the role of Head of Product. Together, they form a trio determined to challenge the grip of the grocery trade on a specific product category.
Kate Björk Öhrfelt explains that they have drawn inspiration from how other e-commerce players have successfully moved recurring everyday purchases from physical stores to the internet:
We see that subscription services are becoming increasingly common today, for everything from meal kits to razors. At the same time, we note that a corresponding service is lacking when it comes to carbon dioxide cartridges, and we want to change that, she says.
Aiming to Expand
According to Pontus Endre, the trio found a bottleneck in consumer behavior, which became the very cornerstone around which they then built the entire e-commerce solution. The company has integrated Postnord as a logistics partner, in order to be able to handle both delivery and collection of returns directly at the door.
We started from a very simple problem: people forget their empty cartridges at home and are left at the checkout without being able to exchange them. Our entire service is built on removing that very step, says Pontus Endre.
Tomorrow, Wednesday, April 8th, the platform will be officially launched. The founding trio has chosen to start sales with a focus on households in Stockholm, but the vision extends further than that.
The goal is to eventually take the e-commerce concept further and expand the company to markets outside of Sweden's borders.