Hi every­one! I hope you have had a relax­ing and good Christ­mas break and feel refreshed and ready for the new year. I hope 2010 will bring you health, hap­pi­ness and all other things you wish for your­self and your family.

I’m just back from a trip to Swe­den, which com­bined nice relax­ation with the fam­ily with use­ful meet­ings and con­tacts for Mum­my­Mug. Really look­ing for­ward to a new year, which will cer­tainly bring lots of hard work but also a lot of fun, I am sure!

As one of my New Year’s res­o­lu­tions is to start vlog­ging, I decided to start right away!

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Today, I have spent over four hours in the car. I have in that time actu­ally not trans­ported myself any fur­ther than back and forth to one sin­gle meet­ing, that took place about 90 kilo­me­ters from my Mum­my­Mug office in The Hague. So, the aver­age 2 hours that I spent dri­ving each way to get there mean I aver­aged a stun­ning 45 kms per hour. On the high­way. Wow. Now, that is the real­ity of liv­ing in the Nether­lands: a great but very, very full lit­tle coun­try, that clogs up every day with queues even though the land­scape is criss-crossed by four or six lane high­ways. And how could we not have these queues, with more than 17 mil­lion peo­ple crowded together here in the polder land­scape? We actu­ally have a pop­u­la­tion den­sity com­pa­ra­ble to that of Bangladesh.

Quite a stark con­trast to Swe­den: my region in Swe­den, Sma­land, has about the sur­face of the Nether­lands, and boasts  a mere 500,000 inhab­i­tants. And that, folks, is a pop­u­lated area of Swe­den. Well — to make up for it, we have at least 17 mil­lion trees though.…

So today, my car was my best friend, and it really deserves a pre­sen­ta­tion I believe. It is a Volvo (of course), a true clas­sic, box-style 240 sta­tion wagon, with nearly 300,000 kms on the teller and is cour­tesy to my brother-in-law, who could not part from his beloved Volvo when upgrad­ing to a newer model. As I can­not afford much more than a bike, really, hav­ing spent all my money on Mum­my­Mug pro­to­types in the past three years, I was very happy to get the chance to take it over.

Because although I must be bru­tally hon­est and admit I do drive this par­tic­u­lar car because I can’t afford another (if I could choose freely, I sup­pose I would go for some­thing with air­con­di­tion­ing, a func­tion­ing radio and power steer­ing. If I could choose REALLY freely, I’d choose an Audi TT.)

But — apart from the sheer func­tion­al­ity, that it starts, moves and tak­ing me to my meet­ings, and apart from the obvi­ous loud and clear state­ment it makes about my Swedish her­itage, it does have tremen­dous char­ac­ter. It’s kind of sail­ing on the road, gen­tly bounc­ing a bit, plough­ing for­ward with dig­nity among all the newer mod­els on the road. it seems to be say­ing: here I come, and I am not mak­ing any excuses! The seats are gen­er­ous, the vis­i­bil­ity great. It is BIG — feels big while dri­ving it, and feels totally absolutely enor­mous when try­ing to park it: yep, I do admit I some­times cir­cle around to find a really eas­ily acces­si­ble simply-drive-in-with-your-nose-first park­ing place, because I will not even think about manoev­er­ing it back­wards into a tiny spot along the road, surely mea­sured made more for a Smart rather than this REAL car.

Oth­ers do recog­nise this too: today, while fill­ing up the tank, a guy get­ting out of a new Volvo (of course) at the pump next to mine gave me (well, the car then!) an appre­cia­tive nod and said: ‘Mooie bak!!’ So you see, it even earns me respect with the guys.

And most impor­tantly: there is some­thing truly bitter-sweet about dri­ving around in this old car. A proud and almost rebel­lious feeling.

Because I know that I drive this par­tic­u­lar car, right now, because of the very a con­scious choice to go for it with Mum­my­Mug. And thus to put the money where it really belongs: in the core of the busi­ness. And to stick with it, no mat­ter how long it takes to reach the goal.

And to feel that what does it mat­ter, if I don’t drive the most lux­u­ri­ous car in the world? What does it mat­ter when I have the fan­tas­tic priv­i­lege instead of fol­low­ing the real dream of cre­at­ing my own business!

Let’s just hope that the car makes it through the next annual inspec­tion, so it also can stay on the road. Either that, or that Mum­my­Mug is on the mar­ket in the mean­time, so I can finally lease that Audi.… ;-)

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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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