I never planned to start my own company.
The idea didn’t come from ambition or a grand vision — it came from a simple request.
In 1996, my editor Stefan told me when I was moving to another company. Before leaving, he said:
“If you’re going to work for someone else, you might as well start your own company — that way I can keep using your services.”
And, yeah, so I did.
At the time, I had no idea how profoundly that decision would change my life, or how I understood work, learning, and storytelling. That was the moment StoryLabs was born — not in name, but in spirit. The company had a different name back then, but the core idea has never changed: to educate people in subjects they care about, in ways that empower them to understand, use, or confidently choose a product. Because real value starts with education — not sales.
My background was in graphic design and illustration. Early on, I spent countless hours illustrating and producing medical textbooks — dense, complex material that demanded clarity and precision. Around the same time, I was also asked to create graphics for the film division at Studentlitteratur, the company I worked with. That was my first step into film production, already in the early 90s, and it quietly reshaped how I thought about communication.
As the years passed, I lived through the IT boom of the late 90s and early 2000s. I saw the rise and fall of the CD-ROM era, the explosion of the internet, and later the birth of YouTube. Rather than resisting change, I followed it — learning new tools, new formats, and new ways of telling stories as technology evolved.
On January 1st, 2015, I walked into IKEA in Älmhult to help start what felt like a small revolution. Together with an exceptional team, we launched Web Ideas, a content initiative that would become IKEA’s largest social media investment at the time. We produced content distributed to 54 countries worldwide, making it one of the most ambitious social media projects of its era.
Over time, I moved from leading content production into a broader role as a marketing leader. That shift gave me a rare inside view of how one of the world’s largest companies actually operates — far from what people often imagine, and in many ways deeply connected to the principles I had unknowingly built my first company on.
In 2019, I returned to standing on my own two feet. This time, the company finally got its name: StoryLabs. I came back with years of new experience — not just in production methods, but in strategy, leadership, and go-to-market thinking.
Looking back, I realize I’ve come full circle. From my early days at Studentlitteratur, learning the fundamentals of clarity and education, to my time at IKEA, understanding scale, strategy, and global impact — the dots now connect. And StoryLabs exists today as the natural result of that journey.
