Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions Builds a New Culture of Security with Panorays

Meet Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions

When your brands are in millions of homes around the world, agility and resilience are non-negotiable. Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions, part of the iconic Freudenberg Group, has been setting the global standard in cleaning innovation for decades.

Known for household names like Vileda, O’Cedar, and Marigold, the Freudenberg Group balances a proud 170+ year family legacy with a commitment to innovation. And like everything they make – wipes, mops, cloths, gloves – FHCS takes caution to keep its digital supply chain as clean and secure.

Home & Cleaning Sector: Smarter Products, Bigger Risks

The home and cleaning sector has seen an influx of digital integrations across product lines, with companies relying on cloud vendors, SaaS platforms, and niche tech partners to bring smart, connected experiences to life.

This digital acceleration comes at a cost: every third-party partnership is a potential attack vector, adding a new layer of risk. With regulations in the EU tightening, companies like FHCS are now accountable for the integrity of their entire digital supply chain, including connections they don’t directly control.

The Challenge: Small Vendors, Big Blind Spots

FHCS took this challenge seriously. As Jochen Moelber, FHCS’ CIO, notes, “We’re a 170-year-old startup. Agility is in our DNA, but so is responsibility”.

As the company’s cloud ecosystem expanded, Moelber and his IT team began noticing a gap: smaller third-party vendors, especially those not covered by mainstream TPRM platforms, became critical yet difficult to assess.

“Ten years ago, everything was done manually,” Moelber recalls. “We’d send out questionnaires, conduct ad-hoc audits… but it just didn’t scale”.

Panorays: Seeing Through Digital Walls

Moelber first noticed Panorays when reviewing risk management reports from Forrester and Gartner. The platform stood out with its potential to meet his team’s needs:

• Continuous monitoring of third-party vendors, even those off the radar of other platforms
• A dashboard that simplified risk communication to non-IT decision makers
• An agile, customer-focused approach, something Moelber says felt more like working with a partner than a provider

“We needed something that would fit into how we actually work,” Moelber explains. “The dashboard gives you that high-level risk snapshot, but what sold our analysts was how easily you can drill into the real issues. Panorays doesn’t only flag findings, it tells you why it’s there and how to fix it.”

Results

With Panorays fully embedded into their vendor selection and onboarding process, FHCS now continuously monitors a growing network of third parties, ranging from critical suppliers to potential M&A targets.

And while Moelber emphasizes that cybersecurity doesn’t always come with a direct ROI, he highlights the transformational impact on everyday operations:

“Panorays makes assessing vendor security as easy as a quick LinkedIn search. We had to put in weeks of work to manually map each vendor’s domains, IT setup, and risk hotspots. Now it takes minutes”.

Final Takeaway

FHCS’s story is one of a family-run business, protecting a 170-year legacy with a digital-native mindset. Their success offers heritage-driven enterprises a few valuable takeaways:

Invest in end-to-end visibility, integrate third-party risk assessment into your business workflows, and leverage continuous monitoring to scale up.

Applying these principles means FHCS can continue to deliver the same quality its customers across 32 countries trust and expect. Behind the scenes, Moelber and his team continue to protect this operational continuity, with a little help from Panorays.