Can You Really Run a Company on Love?
We are Hästens, and we have a singular mission: to make our world a better place by creating the most wonderful beds in the
world. We sell our beds in more than fifty countries on five conti nents. We
believe that our name is synonymous with the utmost levels of mastery and
craftsmanship. Hästens holds a unique place in people’s hearts and minds
because our vision, passion, and intense devotion to quality result in
beds that are like no others—gorgeous beds designed for peaceful,
restorative sleep that can create health and happiness.
You may
wonder how Hästens is able to sustain the unique position it holds in the
minds of consumers worldwide, how we command premium pricing for our
products, and how your company can do likewise. Actually, it’s not that
complicated. You just commit to creating the most value possible for your
customers. You stay focused on that goal. And you don’t worry about
what the competition is doing. Of course, Hästens has an
extraordinary history. But despite being a 170-year-old firm, we think
and act like a start-up. Most importantly, though, we operate our
business on a unique premise.
That premise is love.
Hästens,
quite simply, runs on love—love of people, love of our products, love of
mastery and fine craftsmanship, and love of our mission to create
happiness for people worldwide. You might think that sounds rather corny
or silly. What business really can run on love? Well, Hästens does! You
can feel love’s presence and its remark
able
effects when you visit our factory and offices in Köping, Sweden. In
ever-more locations around the world, you can also feel it from the
moment a warmly smiling team member picks you up to drive you to a
Hästens store. And you’ll certainly feel it when you lie down on one of
our magnificent beds and breathe a sigh of comfort and pleasure.
The most critical resource that we use in running our company is love. In fact, we believe that love is the only way to run any busi ness. That’s right. You, too, can run your business on love, and thereby enjoy a level of success that’s unimaginable for those who are stuck in the conventional business operational mode of furiously running on a hamster wheel—and never getting anywhere.
In many
ways, Hästens has a lot in common with Apple, Inc., a like-minded company
that operates in much the same way we do. Both companies work tirelessly
to create exceptional products with which to delight customers. Everybody
else in our respective fields make commodity products as cheaply as they
can manage. Apple and Hästens create unparalleled, high-value
products—products with which people fall in love and develop fierce
loyalty.
Because of
this dedication to constantly improving our high quality products, Apple and
Hästens each have an intensely devoted fan base. Later in the book, I’ll
tell you the story of how Hästens has collaborated with Apple in
California, where we shared ideas on how to run companies where people
love to work, making products that people cherish.
Hästens Values Run Deep
To
understand how Hästens runs on love, let me take you back to our very
beginnings, 170 years ago. There’s no better place to start our journey
than with the life of the company’s founder, a devoted family man
who overcame severe hardships with an unwavering vision and commitment to
hard work, quality craftsmanship, and service. My grandfather’s grandfather,
Pehr Adolf Janson, was born in 1830 near Köping, Sweden, and grew up in
extreme poverty. Crop failures and other misfortunes led to widespread
hunger and star vation in Sweden at several points during the nineteenth
century. During this period, more than a third of Sweden’s population
fled the hardships and migrated to the United States. By the time
Pehr Adolf was seven years old, his parents had seven children. Two
years later, on Christmas of 1839, his mother died, leaving his father to
care for those children on his own.
Remarkably, Pehr Adolf’s father somehow managed to keep the family together and raise all the children himself. In the process, he came to the conviction that to provide an abundant life for one’s family, it was necessary to master a craft. “I want you to be better than me,” he told his children. “To learn and master a profession of your choosing that will let you give people something they need. And by doing so, you will always be able to look after the ones you love.”
With this
idea instilled in him, Pehr Adolf became an appren tice to a master saddler at
age eighteen. He began learning to make fine leather saddles as well as
beds and mattresses. The making of beds was, at that time, part of the
saddler’s trade. Earning this appren ticeship was a huge accomplishment for
Pehr Adolf, as such trades tended to be near monopolies then. Craftsmen
closely guarded their secrets, choosing their apprentices very carefully.
To work as a master saddler in that day and age required a certificate
issued by the King of Sweden.
Driven by a
determination to avoid the starvation and depri vation he experienced as a boy,
Pehr Adolf applied himself diligently to his apprenticeship. On March 22,
1852, he received his Letter of Mastery, authorizing him to practice his
chosen trade. He soon moved to Hed, a little village just outside the
town of Köping, west of Stockholm, where he set up shop as a master
saddler. By this time, he was married, with four children—Adolf Fredrik,
Ida Elisabeth, Per Thure, and Karl Ludvig. Pehr Adolf was meticulous and
hard
working. He
loved his craft, loved the saddles and beds he made, and loved the people
he served. Because his business was also rooted in love, it grew and
prospered throughout the second half of the nine teenth century.
Passing the Torch
Following
in his father’s footsteps, Per Thure Janson took over the family business
in 1885. He was soon faced with a challenge to the family’s
prosperity—the rise of the automobile. Per Thure recognized that demand
for saddles would soon decline, and he’d be forced to adapt to changing
times as technology advanced. So he pivoted, eventually turning the
company’s focus toward beds and mattresses. Our bookkeeping records,
dating back to the nineteenth century, tell quite a story. We have found
that more than one thousand beds made by our company over fifty years ago
are still in use. In fact, the oldest bed still in use today was
purchased from our company in 1902! Our family’s passion for fine
craftsmanship and continual product innovation soon elevated the company
to the top of its field. To the best of my knowledge, Per Thure’s company
is the oldest remaining company on the planet to still make beds
with handmade mattresses that are stuffed with real horsehair.
By 1917, the family business was in the hands of Per Thure’s son David (my grandfather), who had apprenticed under his father, just as Per Thure had learned from Pehr Adolf. David took the company in a new direction. Instead of the prior model, a master working with apprentices and journeymen to create products, David scaled up the company, moving to a factory model, but maintaining the focus on quality craftsmanship.
Now,
carefully trained workers turned out high-quality beds, mattresses, and
bedding. Hästens was operating as a business. David established our first
trademarks. He was also the first in the family to buy a motor car.
Owning a car deepened his conviction that the market for saddles was
about to decline precipitously.
My
grandfather David deserves the credit for focusing the busi ness on making
outstanding beds while maintaining the family devo tion to quality. The
enterprise was given the name Hästens, derived from the Swedish word for
“horse.” In mid-summer 1917, the first Hästens logo was created by
David’s cousin, an artist named Paul Janson. That logo featured a horse,
both as a nod to Hästens’ origins in Pehr Adolf’s saddlery business, and
because horsehair was—and still is—the signature material in our
upholstery.
In a Hästens bed, each horsetail
hair becomes an amazingly resilient curled strand that functions as a
tiny spring. Together, hundreds of thousands of these soft springs
cushion the sleep er’s body, complementing the work of our internal spring
systems. Another benefit of horsetail hair is that it can breathe. Beds
and linen made from synthetic materials can block ventilation, trapping
heat and causing the temperature to rise under the blanket. This
can result in restless sleep.
Horsetail hair has unique properties. Every strand is hollow, like a tube, and the diameter of this tube is perfectly suited to create a capillary effect. This means that the horsetail hair, prepared in our unique manner, transports moisture with fantastic efficiency. In our experience, it keeps everything dry, which prevents the bed from getting too hot. The exact opposite appears to happen in a bed made with synthetics or foam because these artificial materials are isola tors—and trust me, that is not good when you want your best sleep.
Not just
any horsehair will do, however. If you are committed to excellence, the quality of
the hair matters. It must be carefully selected, washed, boiled, spun,
scorched, and cleaned to bring out the proper filling properties. Because
of this, it is difficult to find horsehair of adequate quality—and in
sufficient quantities—to meet demand and to maintain the high standards
that make a Hästens bed the highly-desirable product that it is.
David and
Per Thure solved this supply problem by starting their own horsehair
processing mill and travelling the world in search of first-rate
materials. They were obsessed with quality, and when they determined that
the best horsehair came from Arabian horses, they went all the way to
Egypt to source horsetail and bring it back to Sweden. Since those days,
nearly a century ago, we have garnered much more expertise regarding the
hair that comes from different horse breeds. We now use a unique,
proprietary mixture, which is the precise combination of hair needed to
create the high level of quality that goes into a Hästens bed.
A New Home for Hästens
By 1924,
the little village of Hed was no longer big enough to serve as a suitable
location for the Janson family’s rapidly growing business. The logistics
of importing twenty metric tons of Egyptian horsehair to this bucolic
hamlet each year were becoming increas
ingly
fraught. David considered moving the company to Stockholm, until love
intervened and guided him in a different direction. He met and fell head
over heels for a woman named Astrid, and ulti mately established Hästens’ new
headquarters in her native town, Köping. A year later, Astrid gave birth
to the couple’s first child— my mother, Solveig.
In 1946,
David met with British architect Ralph Erskine and commissioned him to
build a new Hästens facility. David’s vision was to build a “dream
factory”—a workplace that appealed to people’s aesthetic sensibilities,
rather than merely serving as a warehouse for an assembly line. This
untraditional factory, to be built in Köping, was one of the first that
Erskine designed in Sweden, and since that time it has become an iconic
architectural landmark.
In 1998,
Erskine returned to Köping to expand the building he had designed more
than fifty years earlier. As we walked through the factory, he and I had
a moment together that I still cherish. He stopped me, touched my
shoulder, and said, “Jan, it feels the same as when I was walking here
with your grandfather fifty years ago—the feelings of peace, love, joy,
and abundance.” Yes, time had passed. Technology and the factory design
had progressed. Yet the experience of working at Hästens and the values
by which we live and work remained the same, half a century on. I truly
love the fact that this feeling persists and that we still operate
today as we did back then, as attested to by the architect who designed
the factory many years before I was born.
Facing Challenges
After Per Thure died in 1926,
control of the company went to my grandfather David and his sister.
Because the family did not agree on all aspects of how to run the
business, growth plateaued in the 1950s. After a series of heart attacks,
my grandfather didn’t have the strength to continue to run the company in
the way it needed to be run, and the business started to deteriorate. All
of this would have been quite enough for David to have on his plate—but
then he discov ered that his sister’s husband had been embezzling small amounts
of money from the company since the 1930s. My grandfather intended
to report the matter to the authorities, until he was stopped by an
appeal from his mother. “You can’t go to the police,” she told David. “It
would be terrible for the family.”
So my
grandfather let the matter drop, which may have been necessary to
maintain family cohesion, but at the same time, it contributed to the
difficulties faced by his business. Those difficulties were exacerbated
when the next generation—David’s sister’s chil
dren—took
over their parents’ share of the company. They began to oppose nearly
every decision David made. This constant conflict made David’s working
life miserable and helped to drive the company to the brink of
bankruptcy.
Fortunately,
one of the values we uphold at Hästens, and in our family, is the ability
to learn from negative experiences. The lessons we derived from
this difficult period have been a blessing to every generation of our
family since then. We understand profoundly that internal power struggles
are poison for any family business. Because our fortunes are linked, all
family members must work together to build a solid foundation of mutual
service, love, and peace.
Almost Lost
When David
died in 1963, my parents, Jack and Solveig Ryde, with support from my
aunts Ethel and Yvonne, took over his share of the business. By then,
Hästens had become pretty much worthless, at least on paper. The other
branch of the family tried to sell the company. It was futile; no one
wanted to buy it. Besides the prob
lems caused by family strife, there
were other reasons the company had lost so much value by the 1960s. A
worldwide fascination with technology and speed was growing. Making
hand-crafted goods from natural materials was now deemed old fashioned,
passé.
In the
early 1960s, people wanted inexpensive goods, which necessitated using
second-rate materials and mass production tech niques. Yet Hästens was never
about mass production. Then, as now, we had a proud tradition of master
craftsmanship. Unfortunately, few in the ’60s were interested in tradition—so
in the eyes of the marketplace, Hästens wasn’t worth a single krona.
Of course, we never
felt that way. My parents and my two aunties didn’t want to sell the
company. They wanted to buy out the stake holders in the other branch of our
family. Because of the company’s low value, however, they couldn’t borrow
the money they needed— no bank wanted anything to do with Hästens. Undeterred,
Jack and Solveig managed to borrow money from friends. So many
people contributed that my parents were able to raise the 1.8 million
Swedish kronor they needed. They took over the company after I was born.
It wasn’t
easy. My parents’ struggle to gain full control of Hästens took a couple
of years. In the end they were successful, and their triumph was a
blessing. To this day, I am grateful to my parents for saving Pehr
Adolf’s business and returning it to the control of the original family
line.
Sadly, the
other side of the family soon started to compete with us. Every
Christmas, one of my mother’s relatives would get very drunk and call my
father on the phone to tell him, “This is the year we are going to make
you go bankrupt.” This was something of an annual New Year’s resolution
for him, I think! When I was old enough, I became aware of this strange
family dynamic, and accustomed to it:
“Who was that calling?”
“Nobody
important. It was just someone with his usual New Year’s promise to take
us out of business.”
And that’s how I grew up.
Keeping the Dream Alive
The 1960s
were tough for Hästens. Business kept shrinking, yet somehow my parents
managed to keep the company alive, along with the Hästens unwavering
commitment to quality. My father, Jack Ryde, had a talent for design, and
he began working with different kinds of checkered patterns. He
fine-tuned the proportions and colors of these patterns, and by the late
1970s, he had devised the iconic look that would revolutionize our brand.
Close your eyes and think of Hästens. You see a blue check pattern, don’t you? It wasn’t always this way, though. That iconic pattern actually arrived on the scene 126 years after the company was founded. My father’s stunning blue check pattern was first presented at the Stockholm Furniture Fair in 1978.
Jack had the soul of an artist. As he saw it, a Hästens bed was never meant to be a silent fixture in a darkened room. He wanted to give the bed a bold voice, and to do that, he flew against the prevailing wind when it came to the color scheme. The 1970s were a dark time in the world, what with terrorism, kidnappings, and oil-price shocks. The prevailing color palette was brown, orange, and avocado green. (Look at pictures of homes from that era—you’ll see what I mean.) Jack’s design was fresh and original. It carried joy and positive energy, a sharp contrast to the headlines of the era.
In the
years since then, those blue and white checks have become synonymous with
Hästens’ brand identity. Blue and white—a bold demand for a new way of
looking at and experiencing the world. Those unattractive brown, orange,
and avocado shades made way for a feeling of freedom and a timeless
iconography that would forever
more distinguish Hästens from its competitors.
Love, Quality, and Hästens Endure
In 1987, we
were the smallest of fourteen different companies making beds and
mattresses in Sweden. By 1992, we were outselling what had been the
biggest and nominally the most successful premium brand by a factor of
five to one whenever we were both available in the same stores. By the
late 1990s, our domestic growth had exploded.
At around the same time, our exports began to take off as well. The hard times we’d endured during earlier decades were now well and truly behind us. We no longer had any competition to speak of because, by then, we were beyond competition.
We focus on
quality, not on what others are doing because we aim for the sky and seek
to serve an even higher good. When I lie in a Hästens bed, it feels like
I’m floating. My organs can breathe, relax, and reset. This is
wonderfully restorative, refreshing, and deeply restful. When I fall
asleep in the evening, I never wake up until morning. I sleep well, and
as a result, I function better and more happily during the day. We’re
selling better sleep, but we’re really helping people create better awake
time. Often, people don’t know that they are sleeping poorly because they have never slept well. All people know is that when they sleep
better, they feel better—their minds are sharper, and their days are
filled with more joy.
We believe
that the quality of a Hästens bed is incomparable, which explains why
Hästens, out of all the manufacturers of beds in Sweden, was made
Purveyor to the Swedish Royal Court in 1952. The following year, the King
of Sweden made an official visit to our new factory, for which we remain
very grateful. Since that time, we have remained Purveyor and delivered
at least fifty beds to the royal palace. (I’ve had the pleasure of
meeting the current king several times. King Carl XVI Gustaf is a loving,
caring man, full of warmth and humor.)
Consumers
are intelligent, and they have told us that they’ve noticed there aren’t
many differences among most other mattress brands. They all look pretty
much the same. It would seem to us that they are the
same. The huge difference for Hästens is our willingness to dive
into the spirit of our products and feel their essence, as unusual as
that may sound.
When I only
look at a thing, I will never be able to get in touch with the whole
spirit of it. Diving into the spirit of something means I am able to
sense its entire existence, to get in touch with its vibration, with what
it radiates. This is the key to creating the best possible products.
Because of
its role in the critical biological function of sleep, the essence of a
bed appears to be deeply intertwined with a person’s wellbeing. Not just
their sense of wellbeing—their actual physical wellbeing.
Sleep is much more important than many people realize. People who sleep
well live up to twenty years longer than those who sleep poorly. With
sleep deprivation, the brain becomes cognitively impaired. That’s as true
with short-term sleep loss as it is in cases of chronic sleep disorders.
You literally lose IQ points when you don’t get a good night’s sleep.
Studies
suggest that losing just an hour of high-quality sleep has the same
effect as being slightly drunk. In fact, being awake for eighteen consecutive
hours is equivalent to having a blood-alcohol level of 0.05 percent. If
you’ve been awake for twenty-four hours, your level of impairment
doubles, shooting up 0.1 percent—well over the legal limit for driving in
most countries!1
Most of us are
seldom awake around the clock. And yet, we sleep so poorly. We don’t get
enough sleep, and when we do fall into slumber, we toss and turn. We
often awaken and struggle to get back to sleep. The alarm clock becomes
our enemy. When we have to get out of bed, we do not feel rested or
refreshed. As a result, most people start their day in a state of
diminished alertness compared to how they could be engaging with
the world after having a solid night’s sleep. A night of optimal sleep changes
everything. We restore ourselves. We feel energized and alive. Because
the immune system works better while we’re sleeping well, we increase our
body’s ability to repair itself, thereby increasing our ability to resist
illness as well as to prevent accidents and injuries. By sleeping well,
we enjoy a better day, have a more positive and optimistic outlook, and
we position ourselves to enjoy a longer, healthier, happier life.
Longevity is in part a function of getting good and proper rest.
In today’s
world, with its incessant, hamster-wheel pace, few cultures treat sleep
with a level of importance that matches its true intrinsic value, both to
individuals and to society.
That’s why many people can’t
understand that an investment in a great bed is an investment in their
own health, wellbeing, happi ness, and success. At Hästens, we encourage
everyone to see that when they invest in a bed, they’re investing in
themselves. They often find that they enjoy a return on their investment
they never dreamed possible—that is, if they’ve never slept in a Hästens’
bed before.
Most people
don’t think twice about investing in a fancy new car. Yet we spend a
fraction of the time in our automobiles than we spend in our beds.
Although a car is a necessity in most places, an expensive set of wheels
provides no particular value to your health. Most items we purchase are
visible to the outside world—cars, clothing, and jewelry. A bed is
something we buy for ourselves. People may not see your Hästens bed. They
will see you, however. And they might notice that you’re better rested,
happier, and healthier. And isn’t that more important than driving around
in a four-wheeled status symbol? What could be more valuable than your
health and happiness? If you’re going to invest in a flashy car,
which you’ll keep for only a few years until you trade it in, wouldn’t it
make sense to buy a more modest car and invest your money in a bed that
could improve the quality of your life for a long, long time to come?
We think so! When people sleep in a Hästens, they have shared with
us that they are able to follow their desires in life and fulfill their
missions because they are well-rested. Once people understand this, they
want to invest in one of our beds. The important question they face when
deciding whether to buy a Hästens bed is this: Do I love myself enough to
invest in myself? As soon as they discover that yes, they have that level
of self-love, and they do want to make that invest ment, we ask another
question: What other product could give you these kinds of health
benefits? What other product could give you a better life, full of joy,
love, peace, success, and abundance, compared with a bed from Hästens?
Nothing in your driveway or your clothes closet can do all that for you.
Hästens
desires that all people live their best lives, and toward that end, we
want to give each individual the best possible sleep. We are able to
command premium pricing far beyond that of other manu facturers. One reason,
perhaps, is that many companies tend to see the products they create as
commodities—not as gifts to the world. Let’s face it. Hästens is not your
typical modern company. From the time we were founded, we have run the
business on the concepts of mastery, quality, and above all, love. In
each of the following chap
ters, I will share with you one
more aspect of the Hästens philosophy. By the time you finish reading this
book, you’ll know exactly how to run your organization and your life with
the key ingredient so often overlooked in the business world: Love.
