Building a Mission-Driven Company from Sweden: Anders Ankarlid, CEO of A Good Company (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the next step? How did you get to this company?

Anders Ankarlid: I always had this sense that I will some day come back to e-commerce and bring all of the experience I have gained. Then in the summer of 2018, it was extremely hot in Europe.

My wife was born in Indonesia. She was raised on a farm two hours south of Stockholm. We have eight cows. It’s run by my father-in-law. We live there. We don’t have a TV, but we have internet connections. It’s a really different life than being in London or Stockholm.

Typical of what we do in summertime is we go out with the canoe. We go and check on the animals. Summer of 2018 was really different. Everything was dry. The well had dried out.

My father-in-law has been running the farm since 1950. There was nothing fancy about it. It was about him liking the animals. That made me think about what’s going on. How can it be this hot? How can it be sunny in Sweden? I started reading about climate change.

I realized that if I should do something, that has to be connected to this. I had to be a person who was able to look my kids in the eye and say, “I’m not sure if we had a big enough impact, but I did my best.” That was the spark that led to A Good Company.

Sramana Mitra: What is the concept?

Anders Ankarlid: There are a few things that are important. We are completely transparent. We don’t cut any corners. When we are thinking about something, we keep on going until we have made it as good as we like. We are climate-positive e-commerce company.

We have a fulfillment center in Estonia. We sell to 60 countries per month. 20% of that is US and Canada, and 50% is Europe, and the other is Asia. We started to think about what brands we can bring on to our platform. We decided that we are going to be a brand.

We are going to work direct. We are going to define our products ourselves. We’re going to define the packaging material ourselves. We’re going to distribute in a way that we can control and build a company that I would like to buy from.

People can tell if you’re lying about that story. We are not close to done but we are on a good path. We would like to become an umbrella for sustainable everyday products. We have erased plastics. We take that seriously. We influence factories on how to create products differently and how to take away plastics. That’s the idea.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a Mission-Driven Company from Sweden: Anders Ankarlid, CEO of A Good Company
1 2 3 4 5