THIRTEEN YEARS IN SHANGHAI, TWO COMPANIES OF MY OWN, AND A FACTORY FROM 1896.

I grew up in Tibro, a small Swedish town with furniture manufacturing all around it.

There was sawdust, talk about deliveries at the kitchen table, and a factory within walking distance. I did not think much about the industry then. It was simply part of where I lived.

I studied industrial economics and logistics at Karlstad University and Högskolan i Skövde, finishing in 2004.

By then, work had already started to overlap with what I was studying. I was building websites for companies and beginning my years in purchasing at SA Möbler, so a lot of the theory arrived while I was already trying to understand how things worked in practice.

CapsisMedia started in 1998, when a company website was still unusual for many businesses.

Middle Earth Consulting AB followed in 2004. Over the years, the work covered websites, e-commerce, sourcing, supply chain, 3D and BIM, first from Sweden and later from Shanghai.

Running those companies taught me something fairly simple: ideas matter, but sooner or later they have to work in the real world.

Someone has to use them, buy them or see enough value in them to keep them going.

I worked with purchasing at SA Möbler from 2004 to 2018.

That is where I learned how much sits behind the price of a product.

Materials, tooling, production, quality, freight, duties, delays, mistakes and all the small assumptions hidden inside a quotation.

A low price can be genuinely good. It can also become expensive very quickly when the details have not been understood properly.

Then came Shanghai.

I moved there and stayed for thirteen years.

It was not a posting or a temporary research project. It became home for a significant part of my working life.

I learned enough Chinese to get by, but most of what I learned came from doing the work: visiting factories, working with suppliers, solving production problems, shipping goods and trying to understand situations where my own assumptions were not always useful.

Living there changed the way I work.

You get used to not having the full picture.

You ask more questions. You watch what actually happens. You try something, adjust it and try again. And when a problem really matters, there is still a lot to be said for being in the room where it is happening.

Over time, uncertainty stopped feeling like a sign that something had gone wrong.

It simply became part of doing business.

Factories, samples, containers, customs, specifications and all the small decisions between an idea and a delivered product became normal working life.

I kept doing digital work at the same time because the two sides increasingly seemed connected to me.

Making something well is only part of the job.

People still have to understand it, find it and decide to buy it.

What I brought back from those years was not a set of rules about China.

It was more a way of working: listen before assuming, ask difficult questions early, check what is actually happening and be willing to change the plan when reality says the plan is wrong.

I still like learning things.

Business, manufacturing, technology, how organisations actually work beneath the titles and organisation charts, and whatever new tools have become useful this year.

Usually that means reading, asking people who know more than I do and testing something small before committing too much to it.

For me, staying curious is mostly practical.

It is one of the ways I try to stay useful.

In February 2026, I returned to SA Möbler as leadership assistant.

On 1 June 2026, I became CEO, succeeding my father, Kjell Hammar.

He acquired the company in 1982 and, together with my mother, spent decades developing it.

SA Möbler itself has been making furniture since 1896, long before any of us were involved, and many people have contributed to what the company is today.

I now carry the overall responsibility as CEO, but that does not mean I run the company alone.

Production, sales, design and administration all contain people who know their areas, make decisions and solve problems every day.

My role is to help set direction, make sure important decisions are taken and create the conditions for the different parts of the company to move together.

Part of the work is modernisation.

That can mean selling more internationally, improving how we quote, using digital tools better, developing e-commerce, improving reporting or changing a process that no longer works as well as it should.

Part of the work is also knowing what not to change.

A company that has been around for more than a century has accumulated a great deal of knowledge, and much of that sits with the people who do the work every day.

I did not found SA Möbler, and I am not here to rewrite its history.

My responsibility is to contribute to what comes next, together with the people around me.

Charlie and Henry are the part of life that gives all of this some perspective.

What I want most is for them to be healthy, happy and eventually able to stand on their own.

School matters, but grades are only one part of it.

I care more about whether they keep learning, treat people well, develop judgement and eventually find something that feels like their own life rather than a version of mine.

Some of the most important things are also the hardest to measure.

Away from work, I play golf, not particularly well, and I watch hockey.

I like both partly because they give my head somewhere else to go for a while.

Quite often, that is when an idea turns up.

That is most of the story so far.

If you are dealing with manufacturing, sourcing in Asia, an established company that needs to change without losing what already works, or a digital project that has to earn its place, I am always interested in a good conversation.

The plan does not need to be finished.

A rough version is usually enough to start.