Today, Nordic Knots announced its first-ever fundraise, and it isn’t starting small. The Swedish rug brand has sold a minority stake in its business for $100 million to a group of investors led by Imaginary Ventures, a VC firm that has backed shapewear brand Skims and sustainable fashion brand Reformation. Also along for the ride are Creades, Iris Ventures and entrepreneur Lauren Santo Domingo.
“We’re very ambitious, we don’t settle, and we’re unreasonably hungry to grow this into something significant,” says Nordic Knots co-founder and chief creative director Liza Laserow Berglund. “We’ve had [investors] knocking on our door for about five years, but we always turned them down because, as an organization, you need to be ready. … We feel like it’s the right time.”
“We’ve been happy with the pace we’ve been going,” adds co-founder and CEO Fabian Berglund (he and Laserow Berglund are married). “Now we want to move a little faster.”
Nordic Knots is a family affair. The Berglunds and Fabian’s brother Felix launched the company in 2016 with the goal of filling in the middle space between cheap, low-quality rugs and stratospherically expensive custom options. The collections—mostly made in India—were sharply designed; the selection was tightly edited; and Nordic Knots carved out some DTC success among both U.S. customers and the trade.
The pandemic home boom added rocket fuel to the business—a broader resurgence of consumer interest in rugs didn’t hurt either. Over the past two years, Nordic Knots has expanded its product mix to include curtains and bedding and opened a first U.S. store in Manhattan. It’s on the verge of debuting a Los Angeles flagship (the full brick-and-mortar fleet also includes an outpost in London and the company’s home base in Stockholm). The Berglunds say they’re targeting $100 million in revenue for 2026.
The new investment will help open more stores. But the company’s true ambition is to expand into a fully fledged lifestyle brand. Nordic Knots will soon add more textiles into its mix, even selling fabric by the yard. Further on the horizon is furniture. “People come to us and say, ‘I want to have the look; I want the picture,’” says Berglund. “And in that picture we have furniture that we’ve sourced and upholstered with our fabric.”
“It’s building the room from the ground up. You have the rug, you have the furniture on the rug, you dress the windows with our fabric,” adds Laserow Berglund. “What we can really do is create a uniform for the home that’s easy for the consumer.”
Along the way, the Berglunds intend to keep developing their designer business in tandem with their consumer one—currently designers make up roughly 30 percent of their customer base—by staffing up their trade program and building out their online trade portal.
In raising money with an eye toward expanding into new categories, the brand will soon find itself in a new competitive set. Berglund hopes Nordic Knots can carve its own path. “We don’t think there’s a competitor that’s doing exactly what we want to do. There’s the multicategory brands that have a bit of everything, then there’s the very focused mono brands. … [There are] rug players that are more traditional at the higher end, and fabric houses,” he says. “We like that we are somewhere in between those.”
