Buying an industrial building the way you buy a product online: that is Steel Shed's wager. In 25 years, the company has sold more than 25,000 steel buildings worldwide!
Buying an industrial building the way you buy a product online: that is the wager – a winning one – made by Steel Shed. In 25 years, the company founded by two Frenchmen has sold more than 25,000 steel buildings worldwide and now posts turnover of more than €50m.
What if building a warehouse or an agricultural building came down to a few clicks? That is the idea behind Steel Shed, a family business that has become, in two decades, an international player in the remote sale of steel buildings.
The company, sometimes described as the "Tesla of steel buildings", has not invented a new construction process. What it has done is apply online retail methods to the construction sector, betting on price transparency, standardisation and a digital customer journey. The model remains unusual in a market historically dominated by bespoke design studies, long technical exchanges and traditional sales channels.
With Steel Shed and its 3D configurator, customers can now define their project, obtain an immediate budget estimate and then order their building remotely, with technical support along the way. "Traditionally, this sector is driven by engineers who do sales. We are salespeople who sell technical solutions," says Vincent Lyonnet, partner in charge of development and communications.
The model rests on several levers: standardised design, optimised steel purchasing, international logistics and direct sales. A combination that, according to the company, allows Steel Shed to offer prices 20 to 40% below the market.
© Steel Shed
Founded in 2001, Steel Shed today claims more than 4 million m² delivered across more than 65 countries in Europe, Africa and Oceania. Growth has accelerated in recent years: having started with a few hundred transactions a year, the group now exceeds 3,800 sales annually. Based in Luxembourg, at the heart of a region with a long steelmaking history, Steel Shed enjoys a central position from which to serve the European market.
The company adapts each of its buildings to the constraints of the destination country, whether snow loads, resistance to high winds, requirements tied to cyclone zones or local regulations in force. Design is carried out in Luxembourg, while some of the structures are then assembled in France, at the group's logistics hub in Haute-Saône, before being shipped to their respective markets.
This command of the logistics chain is one of the group's differentiators: it can calculate down to the number of containers needed to ship a building overseas.
To explain its pricing, Steel Shed points to an industrialisation strategy close to those applied in other sectors. Standardisation first keeps design costs down. International sourcing of high-strength steel then holds purchase prices in check. Finally, hot dip galvanization, included as standard in its offers, is intended to make the structures last longer. The company also stresses that steel is recyclable, presenting this as an environmental advantage over materials that are harder to recover.
Some buildings can be assembled by customers themselves, along the lines of an industrial kit, with the option to pay in three interest-free instalments.
© Steel Shed
Steel Shed now operates three complementary brands:
Having won over SMEs, tradespeople and farmers, Steel Shed now intends to shift up a gear. With its offering for key accounts, the company hopes to win round customers used to the traditional players in industrial construction. Its wager is a simple one: apply to steel buildings what Tesla did in the car industry – simplify the purchase, speed up the decision and put the customer experience at the centre. Whether the industrial market, long attached to bespoke approaches, will in turn accept ordering its buildings like digital products remains to be seen.
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