How Glaston Redefined Glass Machinery Buying with a Digital-First Brand and Transparent Pricing

When your core segment stops growing, you either defend the past or design the future.

Glaston, a long-time premium player in glass processing machinery, chose the latter. In just three months, they launched Uniglass by Glaston, a digital-first brand and online configurator with transparent pricing, built to win a new mid-market segment and modern buyers who expect to research, compare, and get price indications online. See more about the launch from Cision News.

Meet Glaston

Glaston is a global technology company specializing in glass processing machinery and services for architectural, automotive, solar and appliance industries. With over 150 years of history and decades at the forefront of glass processing tech, Glaston is known as an innovative premium provider of tempering, laminating, insulating and bending solutions.In 2024, the Group’s net sales amounted to €217.9 million and the comparable EBITA was €15.3 million.

“We’re manufacturing equipment for glass processing. Our customers use our equipment to process glass – and we provide the services and solutions around it.”
— Miika Äppelqvist, CEO, Glaston Group

Traditionally, Glaston has focused on complex, customized lines sold through direct sales supported by local agents. They have strong engineering depth and long-term partnerships at the core.

The Strategic Challenge: Premium Segment, Limited Headroom

Glaston’s legacy position is clear: premium solutions for demanding customers.

But that position comes with a structural challenge:

• The premium niche isn’t getting bigger.
  
• Market uncertainty and slow construction cycles put pressure on capex decisions.
  
• Growth requires capturing new segments, not just optimizing the old playbook.
  

“Traditionally we have been more of a premium market player. The problem is that this premium segment is not getting bigger. If you don’t grow, you end up doing something else. So our challenge was: how can we grow in other segments than we are today?” Miika Äppelqvist

At the same time, buyer behavior has shifted:

• Customers spend more time online.
  
• They want to advance further in the buying journey digitally.
  
• They expect clarity, comparability, and no-nonsense information (Yes, including price.)
  

Glaston’s historic model (exhibitions, area managers, agents) was strong but not designed for today’s b2b buying.

CEO owns strategic changes (Including going digital in sales) 

For Glaston, this wasn’t “a marketing project” or “an IT tool.”

“This is a big strategic decision on how you reach and how you sell to your customers. When you want a real change in the way of working, top management needs to be very interested.” – Miika Äppelqvist

Miika personally sponsored the initiative as CEO, framing it as:

• A growth decision, not a website update.
  
• A way to scale sales reach without building a huge new field organization.
  
• A controlled way to test new markets and a new segment with low risk and fast feedback.

Build In-House or Use a Ready-Made Platform for digital sales?

Inside Glaston, sales teams use a separate tool to calculate and prepare detailed offers for complex production lines. But what works for engineers and pricing experts isn’t what helps customers take their first step.

For buyers, Glaston wanted something faster, clearer, and easier — a way to explore configurations without needing technical expertise.

So why they chose HeadQ’s SaaS solution instead:

• Limited internal IT capacity → They didn’t want to build this internally. Here’s an detailed article comparing options of building one yourself vs. using HeadQ’s ready-made solution.
  
• Existing tools are great for internal complexity, but too heavy for a first-touch buyer experience.
  
• Need for speed: waiting 6 – 12 months for a custom project was not an option. They needed to launch something fast.
  

“The main driver was speed. We don’t have a huge IT organization, and building this ourselves would have been very challenging. Existing CPQ tools handle complexity well, but that’s exactly what we didn’t want to show to customers. We wanted something simple that we can launch fast and test.” – Miika Äppelqvist

This is where HeadQ came in: a ready-made, configurable digital sales layer that sits in front of Glaston’s know-how, not a multi-year IT bet.

The HeadQ Solution: Uniglass by Glaston: Digital-First, Price-Transparent

To reach the mid-market with a simpler, more standardized offering, Glaston:

1. Launched Uniglass by Glaston – a dedicated brand and product range designed for standard, proven glass processing equipment in a new value segment. 

2. Built a web-based configurator with HeadQ:
   
   • Customers select the line type (e.g. glass tempering or IG line).
     
   • Choose key dimensions and option packages.
     
   • Define layout direction (left-to-right / right-to-left).
     
   • See standard features clearly listed.
     
3. Enabled instant price indication:
   
   • After configuration and contact details, buyers receive a transparent price range.
     
   • They can immediately request an official quote from sales.
     

“Customers can configure their own solution, see how it fits their factory layout, give their contacts, get a price indication, and then request an official quote. It’s a digital-first sales experience for this segment.” Miika Äppelqvist

The complexity stays where it belongs (inside of Glaston). What the buyer sees: clarity, speed, and control.

Finding the Balance: Simple Enough to Use, Serious Enough for Glass Lines

Internally, the hardest part wasn’t the tool, it was letting go of over-engineering.

“We are still more of an engineering company. Our engineers can handle thousands of items and configurations. Customers cannot. To execute fast, we had to standardize more. You need those standardization decisions if you want an offering that’s simple enough to configure online.” – Miika Äppelqvist

Glaston treated the initiative like a startup inside the company:

• Fast decisions.
  
• Standardized offering for Uniglass.
  
• Clear scope: focus on the most relevant choices for the majority of buyers.
  
• Three months from brand + concept to live digital sales channel. 

Why Glaston Chose to Show Prices (Even to Competitors)

Publishing price indications online was debated all the way to the board of Glaston.

“When you go to a new market, you need to prove you are serious. Positioning in terms of price is part of that. A nice website alone doesn’t do it. What makes the launch fast and interesting is giving more information. And price is the most interesting thing for buyers.” – Miika Äppelqvist

Key logic:

• Competitors already roughly know where pricing sits.
  
• Buyers save time by instantly seeing if Glaston / Uniglass is in their range.
  
• Transparent pricing accelerates trust in new markets and segments.
  
• Online pricing + configurator extends Glaston’s reach beyond limited in-person time.
  

Early Results: Proof in a Week

The Uniglass configurator went live and impact followed quickly:

• 10 quote requests in the first week of launch (mid-market line, new channel).
  
• Clear digital-first path: prospects configure, see their options, get a price indication, then move into sales dialogue.
  
• Glaston’s team expects to close the first major deals within the first months, not years.
  

“We’ve been live for about a week, and already have around ten quotation requests. It’s starting off extremely well. Our target is to close our first bigger deal this year.” – Miika Äppelqvist

The launch also triggered healthy internal and channel discussions:

• Some partners asked, “What is my role now?”
  
• Glaston’s answer: digital will carry the buyer further before human contact, but partners remain critical in later stages and local relationships.

Real Business Impact (So Far)

Even at an early stage, three things are clear:

1. Speed to Market
   From strategic decision to new brand + configurator + transparent pricing in about three months. All without a massive IT program.
   
2. New Segment Access
   Uniglass by Glaston opens a mid-market entry point with a lighter, standardized, digitally sold portfolio instead of stretching the premium model.
   
3. Scalable Digital Sales Channel
   Glaston can now:
   
   • Capture demand 24/7.
     
   • Let buyers self-educate and pre-qualify.
     
   • Route only real opportunities to sales and partners.

“These are not anymore multi-year, huge-budget projects. You can test, get results fast, and there is very little to lose. HeadQ is a great solution for this.”- Miika Äppelqvist

A Note from Glaston Group’s CEO, Miika to Fellow CEOs in Manufacturing

“I know many of you. We meet at trade shows, in industry associations, or through mutual partners. We all share a similar background. We’ve built our companies on engineering excellence, long-term relationships, and trust earned over decades. None of that changes with digitalization. But how buyers start their journey has already changed.

Today, almost every customer, even in the most traditional B2B sectors starts online. They search, they compare, they calculate, and they try to understand before they ever reach out. 

That means we have two options: either we meet them there, or someone else will.

When we started our own digital sales initiative at Glaston, it wasn’t because we wanted to “be modern.” It was because we needed growth, and the growth was no longer in our traditional premium segment. We needed new ways to reach customers, new markets, and new sales channels. Digital was the obvious next step. Not a buzzword, but a business enabler.

And I’ll be honest. I know that change is scary.

It’s uncomfortable to open your pricing. It’s hard to simplify products that engineers have perfected for decades. It’s uneasy to tell people that the way we’ve always sold might not be enough anymore.

But that’s exactly why leadership matters most now.

My advice to other CEOs is simple:

• Treat it as a strategic move, not a marketing project.The way you sell defines how you grow. If you don’t evolve how you sell, you limit how far your company can go.
  
• Start small, but start fast. These are no longer multi-year IT programs. You can launch a simple digital sales channel in months, test it, see real data, and iterate. There is very little to lose. And a lot to learn.
  
• Empower your teams, but stay close. Digital sales touches every part of the organization: sales, marketing, IT, product. Without leadership buy-in, it stalls. When top management shows commitment, things start to move.
  
• Think of it as expanding your reach, not replacing people. Our partners and sales teams still play a vital role. But now we can serve customers earlier in their journey, even before the first meeting.
  

Digital transformation isn’t about replacing what works. It’s about extending it into places your customer already is.

So to my fellow CEOs: take that first step. Try something. Launch a configurator. Publish transparent pricing. Measure what happens. You might be surprised how quickly the market reacts. And how your people rise to the challenge.

If the implementation is easy and the promise is high: why wait?”

Miika Äppelqvist,
CEO
Glaston Group