Today my daugh­ter Eleonore, who is half Swedish, half Dutch, has had her real Swedish bap­tism of fire — which I am proud to say she passed with fly­ing colours.

At the ten­der age of four, she man­aged to drive in her first wooden plug all by her­self, and thus helped me assem­ble the most rep­re­sen­ta­tive piece of fur­ni­ture of all from the most Swedish com­pany of them all: the Billy book­shelf from IKEA. I am sure you have heard of it. Chances you have one or two at home?!

Well, I have sev­eral now, and have decided to be proud of admit­ting it. Not a self evi­dent way to feel about it: a Billy is actu­ally that sort of pur­chase that you set out NOT to make. Too ordi­nary, too bor­ing, too… Billy. I started look­ing for a book­shelf, and vowed NOT to buy a Billy. Not again.

But.…. after look­ing around, real­is­ing that custom-made designer book­shelfs cost four times the money, that the Billy does the same job for a frac­tion of the price, looks neat and that all the dif­fer­ent avail­able ele­ments and mod­ules mean you can com­bine it into some­thing quite nice, I did it again. I bought Billy. The fact that they gave a 20% dis­count at IKEA yes­ter­day, to cel­e­brate that this prod­uct is already 30 years (!) in the mar­ket did not make the deci­sion more difficult.

The trip to IKEA was as always also a chance to tank up on Swedish-ness. To indulge in meat­balls, and to be sur­rounded by a sober, real­is­tic, no-frills but yet very cre­ative and inspir­ing atmos­phere that char­ac­terises this impres­sive Swedish com­pany. Because whether you like it or not, whether you have resisted the Billy-craze or not, I trust you agree with me that it is impres­sive to build up an ever expand­ing busi­ness of the reach, mag­ni­tude and influ­ence on people’s life that IKEA has achieved — and keep it a fam­ily run-business at that.

Com­pared to the super-tanker IKEA, my Mum­my­Mug com­pany is of course not more than a lit­tle row­ing boat. And I have not man­aged to keep Mum­my­Mug a fam­ily busi­ness. It has been nec­es­sary to raise cap­i­tal to go from idea to mar­ket, and I also much ben­e­fit from hav­ing part­ners in my com­pany that help build a viable strat­egy. But apart from that, there are many other ideals and aspects on doing busi­ness that I like to take inspi­ra­tion from this the most Swedish of all companies.

I per­ceive their strat­egy as as keep­ing it sim­ple. Keep­ing it down to earth. Strive to offer peo­ple some­thing they really need and some­thing and where the designer has payed atten­tion to form as well as func­tion. And to keep on lis­ten­ing, to stay tuned into what is actu­ally going on out there.

Now, those are busi­ness prin­ci­ples I also vow to abide by. To offer also a Mum­my­Mug that is use­ful, func­tional and well designed. Sim­ply from Swe­den, with love.

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