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In 2004, Lyko established a webshop from its hair salon in Sweden. Over the next few years, the family-owned company transformed that online presence into a retail platform, and in 2010 it moved into a new warehouse in Vansbro. In 2017, it went public and soon after expanded its market to cover eight countries.
Lyko subsequently capitalised on the e-commerce boom and doubled its customer base. The company has continued to gain market share in the Nordics while laying a solid foundation for that future expansion across Europe.
“Today we have about 35 stores and we’re looking to expand that rapidly,” says Rickard Lyko, Founder and CEO. “Currently the business profile is 80% online sales and 20% is from stores, and we find the combination of physical and digital works really well for us.”
A dynamic and growing business
In fact, the outlook has been almost continual growth, culminating in recording-breaking figures for 2024. Today, the company offers around 72,000 products from over 1,200 brands.
“We’ve had some tremendous growth over the years, and of course we need to extend our logistic capabilities to handle that growth and volume,” explains Lyko’s Chief Technical Officer Peter Gunnarsson. “It’s also about meeting the needs of the customer and extending the customer experience in the best of ways.”
Flexibility and efficiency
To help achieve its ambitions, the company looked for a partner that could fully automate its Vansbro warehouse. Lyko required logistic automation that could primarily service small online orders, but also replenishment centres based in physical stores. The flexibility, efficiency and scalability of FASTPICK – as well as its small footprint – stood out as Vanderlande was selected as its preferred supplier in 2023.
“We sent a request for quotation to a lot of suppliers, but in the end the choice was Vanderlande, because it was best solution to meet our demands,” says Peter. “And using FASTPICK was a step forward for us in terms of efficiency and managing growth.”
The system went live in the summer of 2025, and features the ADAPTO automated storage and retrieval system. Its 216 ADAPTO shuttles are able to access more than 152,000 product locations across 27 levels and 40 aisles. Also included is Vanderlande’s POSISORTER shipping sorter, which provides careful product handling of Lyko’s stock of fragile and often expensive products.
Intuitive workstations
In addition, Vanderlande has supplied 15 goods-to-person workstations – three of which have been integrated with item-picking robots. The manual workstations are height adjustable to minimise lifting duties for operators and, as Peter explains, they are intuitive to use: “It’s so easy for our operators to adapt to the new stations – we give them two days of introduction and then they’re off, performing at full speed.
“I think the impressive part about Vanderlande was the ability to put everything together, and we now have a system that is much faster than the old automation that we had,” he adds. “Throughout the project there has been a really good cooperation between Lyko and Vanderlande – and what was really interesting was our ability to match cultures.”
Precise work from item-picking robots
The Lyko automation project also includes the use of Vanderlande’s item picking robotics. “I think the robot picking is super interesting, because it will allow us to scale even more,” says Rickard. “And we need to scale and be more automated to handle the growth we are going for.”
The three robots can pick from eight compartments in a product tote before gently placing items in the outbound cartons in a speedy and efficient manner. The process is precise and the robots can automatically change grippers to meet different handling requirements.
“We had to teach our operators to decant products in a new way – such as making sure individual items are lying flat – to make them robot-friendly for picking and placing in the cartons,” explains Ellinor Belin, from Lyko’s Business Development team. “We think the robots will learn to pick the majority of our assortments since most are small items that have good shapes.”
The robots are integrating well – both with the system and their human counterparts. “If we continue the way we have since the go-live to improve the process and efficiency, I can definitely see us having more robots in the future,” adds Ellinor. “Our employees like them, as it’s fun to have robots in the warehouse and they see them as new colleagues.”
Packing less air
Vanderlande’s solution also adds value to Lyko’s sustainability ambitions. The packing process provides a variety of box sizes, so that both large and small orders can be shipped with maximum efficiency.
“The challenge is to find the right mix, but in the end it’s so much more sustainable if we can reduce the air we put into cartons,” explains Peter. “It means we’re sending out fewer trucks from the warehouse than our competitors.” In turn, fewer journeys lead to fewer transport emissions.
Thinking about the future
As further increases in sales are anticipated in the coming years, it’s essential that Lyko keeps up with demand in a competitive marketplace. At the moment, the solution can handle around 45,000 orders every day, but there is scope to extend capacity when the need arises.
“For us, it’s super important we have a system that we can keep growing and optimising,” says Rickard. “And this is a good solution for that.”
“We’ve chosen this system for its scalability,” adds Peter. “But it’s also important for us to create a blueprint, because we know our next step will be a new facility, somewhere in Europe – and we consider this project to be the blueprint for the next warehouse.”