It is 1948 and Arne Lydmar has just left IBM. The fast-thinking entrepreneur, trained in electrical engineering, good with logic and numbers, and said to be impossible to beat at cards, has taken the first steps and registered his engineering firm, Elfa. His wife, Britta, helped him making the mail- order catalogues, piling high on the kitchen table. 64 pages of “Everything between antenna and earth.” Nils Strinning, Britta Lydmar’s enter- prising cousin, is also present at the same location and time. He has designed an ingenious dish rack made of steel wire. Seeing the phenomenal potential in Strinning’s idea, Arne Lydmar agrees to manufacture it. He does not for a second consider that dish racks not quite are part of Elfa’s core business. Neither does his newly hired sales manager. “Good business is good business.” But to solve the techni- calities, he suggests to hire his brother, Björn Hoff. It happens that Björn is employed at Osterman’s, Sweden’s largest car reseller. A good position, no doubt. Would he accept taking on a responsibility he has no clue about? Fortunately, he does. Björn turns out to be a genius me- chanic. He finds himself a basement space suitable for an engineering workshop and gets immediately to work with the design of the custom tools needed to manufacture Nils’ dish racks. As he does not know how to weld or use the workshop tools, he has to learn along the way. This is a spirit Elfa still swears by to this day. And it certainly pays off for Björn. Elfa’s first factory opens only a few months later. 2