About BURNHARD
As dedicated grillers, the team of BURNHARD knows what really matters: high-performance grilling machines with well-thought-out features – no compromises, but also no unnecessary frills. Their grills come equipped with everything a grilling aficionado could wish for: immense power, the right accessories, and the specific features that elevate your BBQ game. What started in 2018 with a small group of grillers under the umbrella of Springlane GmbH has grown into the ultimate German BBQ brand. BURNHARD develops these exact products at their location in Düsseldorf, collaborating with product developers, engineers, and grilling experts. In addition, what differentiates the brand from others is the direct dialogue with their buddies from the BBQ community.
Why Heliad chose BURNHARD
As we invested in the company’s Seed Round back in 2012, we have accompanied the founder Marius Fritzsche-Rüschenbeck for over a decade. Trusting his execution skills, we saw the rise of the in-house brand BURNHARD with great joy as they tapped into a vast market opportunity, ready for disruption. Connecting high-quality products with their huge community (>220k followers on social media) led to the rise of a D2C consumer brand, embedded in their huge fan base which they always feed with creative recipes and community events like the BURNHARD Baconville festival. As we at Heliad prioritize a customer-centric approach and bringing customer friendliness to the next level through new-thought service approaches, we loved to see their team of product specialists, engineers, content creators, techies and chefs push the boundaries of the BBQ experience to the maximum.
Statistics
How Heliad added value
As we are always standing in close contact to our founders, we continuously monitor their performance in qualitative and quantitative matters. Supporting the strategic decision management in Capital, Product & Sales Management is one of our core offerings. Thus, when e-commerce started to experience volatile times since 2020, we worked together with BURNHARD’s executive board to ensure they would go out as a winner and strive even further towards sector leadership. At first, we connected them with our portfolio company MODIFI, enhancing their working capital management to enable maximum operational freedom. Moreover, we delved deep into the numbers to focus the business on only the most profitable and high-growth products, where the strategic focus was clearly set on BURNHARD. To propel our vision, we collaborated with our co-investors and led a new financing round. Last but not least, for our new office in Frankfurt, we got ourselves a grill and, without any regret, chose the Big FRED | 4-Brenner Gasgrill Deluxe – Series 3 from BURNHARD, and we spread the word and recommended hundreds of BURNHARD grills to our families, friends and valuable network partners.
Timeline
FOUNDER & CEO, BURNHARD
Marius Fritzsche-Rüschenbeck
Heliad’s team is supporting us hands on regarding capital raising, investor network and strategic considerations, including IPO discussions. They are a true value-add to our strategic decision management and help us in navigating the present volatile markets.
