The European technical consumer goods market reached €857 billion in FY2025, growing 5% in value, according to NielsenIQ. Most of the brands nonplusultra takes into that market travel in one direction: global players — American, Asian — entering Europe from outside. AVM's FRITZ!, the market-leading home-networking brand in Germany, is the rarer case. It is a European champion expanding across its own continent, and nonplusultra is supporting that expansion by opening fast access to the buyers and decision-makers who control the shelves and bringing the retailer and distribution network that turns domestic strength into retail presence in markets where the brand still starts from a lower base.
We took this on because the direction is unusual and the pattern behind it is becoming more common. The instinct, when a strong domestic brand looks beyond its home market, is to treat "Europe" as a single next step. The reality is that expanding within Europe can be harder than entering it from outside: a home-market champion carries expectations into neighbouring markets that a foreign entrant never has to manage, and no two of those markets buy the same way.
This post sets out why a European brand expanding across Europe is its own kind of challenge, why the timing favours it now, and what the work signals for any domestic champion considering the same move.
The Direction Most Brands Travel
Nearly every brand nonplusultra has taken into European retail has come from outside the continent — global names looking for a credible route onto European shelves. FRITZ! reverses that. It is already a household name in one of Europe's most demanding markets, now carrying that strength outward into the rest of the continent. The reversal sounds like it should be easier — the brand is already European, already proven. In practice it introduces a different problem: a proven European brand is expected to already understand Europe, when in fact every market beyond the home one is as unfamiliar as it would be to any newcomer.
A Category Leader at Home Is Not Automatically One Abroad
FRITZ! has something most brands entering a new market do not: genuine category leadership, built over years in a demanding home market. That standing is real value — it gives retailers a reason to take the first meeting, and to take the brand seriously once they do. What it does not do is guarantee shelf space in markets where local buyers have never had to reckon with the brand.
Retail buyers in a new market do not inherit the trust the brand earned at home. They assess it the way they assess any new entrant: shelf rotation, category fit, margin, marketing support, and whether the brand will still be backing the listing in eighteen months. The home reputation opens the door; what happens after that is decided on the buyer's own terms.
Europe Is Not a Market — It's a Dozen Retail Systems
The hardest thing to convey about European expansion is that Europe is not a destination. The route to a consumer in one European market looks nothing like the route in another. Channel mix, the balance between carrier and retail, the weight of online versus physical, and the expectations buyers place on a brand all change at each border. A plan that works in one market will not simply port to the next — which is why we treat each market as a separate entry rather than a single regional rollout.
Connectivity happens to be one of the few hardware categories where demand is rising structurally across the continent at once — fibre rollouts, Wi-Fi upgrade cycles, and the steady accumulation of connected devices in the average home all push households toward better networking equipment. That demand exists regardless of which brand meets it, which makes the timing favourable: entering while a category is growing is far easier than entering a flat one, because retailers are actively looking for products that bring incremental demand rather than re-slicing an existing shelf.
What We Are Building With FRITZ!
Our role is supporting, not steering. FRITZ! runs the expansion and has its own people on the ground; we add the access and the network that make a new entry move faster. In practice that means putting FRITZ! in front of the right buyers and decision-makers without the usual cold-start delay, bringing the retailer and distribution relationships suited to each market's structure, and treating every market as its own entry rather than one campaign.
That last point is where most expansions quietly fail. A brand can win a listing and still lose the market if no one locally is making sure the product is visible, correctly positioned, and properly explained at the point of sale. Demand for a networking product is rarely created in a single advertising moment; it is built through consistent presence in the channels where people actually decide.
This is the part of the work that does not transfer from headquarters. It has to be built in-market, in-language, market by market — which is precisely the brief.
The Pattern Behind the Partnership
FRITZ! is a specific brand with a specific opportunity, but the shape of this expansion is one we expect to see more often. European hardware companies with strong domestic positions are realising that the easiest growth left to them is not another point of share at home, but the markets next door where they have barely competed.
Made in Europe is part of why the timing works. For a growing segment of European retail buyers and consumers, a credible European alternative in a category dominated by a few large global players is genuinely attractive — provided the product and the support behind it are strong. FRITZ! moves into these markets with both.
The brands that act on this early will define the European alternative in their categories before those categories consolidate around someone else. The ones that wait will find the shelf space, and the buyer relationships, already taken.
Three Things to Take Away
▸Treat a multi-market expansion as separate entries, not a regional rollout. European markets differ more in retail structure than their shared geography suggests, and a single plan applied across all of them is the most common reason expansions stall.
▸Use domestic leadership as credibility, not as a shortcut. A strong home position opens the buyer conversation faster, but the listing is still won on the same terms as any new entrant: category fit, support, and staying power.
▸Sequence shelf access and local presence ahead of brand marketing. Demand has to have somewhere to land. Distribution, the right retail partners, and people on the ground in each market decide whether marketing spend converts or evaporates.
The wider shifts shaping how brands win retail across the region are covered in our post on the five forces reshaping EMEA consumer electronics in 2026.
Planning to take a strong domestic brand into new European markets? Let's talk about retail entry that holds. Strategic Retail Management