The unusual combination
I run businesses and I build them. Those two rarely live in the same person, and the overlap is the whole of what I sell.
The ERP that never arrived
The team had already picked it. Stores were open, e-commerce was live, the business needed a spine, and an ERP is what you buy when a business needs a spine. Sensible. I said no.
Not because I had a better vendor. Because I had spent enough evenings in the stack to know that what we needed had become cheap to build and expensive to buy. We built the goods supply flow and the product information layer ourselves, and bought the e-commerce platform, the email system and the checkout, where we could not specify well enough to build.
You are new, the decision is nearly made, and the meeting is waiting. What do you say?
From a status report, the ERP wins every time.
The combination
I run businesses and I build with the technology myself, in the repository, most weeks. The usual career carries you away from the work until you are approving things you could not do. The people who stayed close to the work rarely had to make a shop pay for itself. I kept both, mostly by refusing to drop the second one when it left my job description.
A square and a circleOrder and creativity, and most people are handed one of the two. Bring them together.
Curious to the point of nuisance, driven, and nerdy enough to have opinions about image file formats. What I am actually paid for is translation. I can hold the technical argument, the commercial one and the design one in the same conversation, and say out loud which two are only pretending to agree. That is rarer than being good at any one of them, and considerably less fun at parties.
Gaston
Gaston was ICA's pet retail concept for dogs and cats. Four stores plus e-commerce on a head office of six, and I ran it. It was built as agent driven retail from the first day, which is a different exercise from adding AI to something that already exists, and a better one.
A small team, a lot of agents, three rules. Agents read freely and wrote nothing without a person approving it. Every shared agent had one named owner. Every quarter that owner said whether it still earned its place, and if not we switched it off. Half the team could not write code and could still make the system do new things, which is where the speed came from.
Issue 02 is the full account, including the month everyone got good at the easy things and stopped.
At Gaston we proved that a retail business can run on agents. Now I want to do it again.
Previously at ICA
Before that I built two things inside ICA. ICAx, the innovation hub, from 2017 to the end of 2023: more than 120 projects across retail, banking and pharmacy, and 19 per cent of them went live in production, among them unmanned stores, ICA Paket, digital receipts and ICA på jobbet. Then New Business from 2024, with a remit to start businesses rather than projects, which produced unmanned stores, a parcel business and Gaston.
What decided that number was not the ideas. It was the team of eighteen, and the culture we built around it.
Seven years of that teaches you where the resistance sits, and it is not money or ideas. It is the distance between a decision and a thing existing. A build hub is judged on what it hands over, not on what it presents.
Two shops that run without me
Binary and Thread sells clothing and design under a techno-minimalist brand at binaryandthread.com, operated by agents, growing on organic traffic only. It publishes a weekly letter and a field guide. Four subscribers.
Ro Sweden is the other, at rosweden.com, an AI-native shop for cleaning products, live with more than a hundred and eighty products, operated by an agent rather than by me.
Neither makes meaningful money. Both make evidence.
Two small shops that run by themselves beat any slide about agents.
Before that
Twenty years in Nordic retail, most of it at ICA and most of it in whichever part was being rebuilt. Category management, marketing, then digital through the years those channels stopped being a brochure and became a business.
In 2016 I started and led ICA's marketing transformation, more than 150 people working in scaled agile, and it became the prototype for the planning model ICA uses today. It also made me Entrepreneur of the Year inside ICA, mostly for explaining hard things to the retailers. In 2017 I spent half a year as CEO of Smart Video Nordic, a venture-backed startup with an early AI service that read video second by second and turned it into metadata for advertising. My job was to make the technology sell.
Board member of a grocery store since 2018, which keeps me honest about what a shop is.
Open to Managing Director and CEO roles. And now: advisory and interim, talks and workshops, hands-on building with your team.
If you want to meet, call. That is the whole funnel.