Building a Mission-Driven Company from Sweden: Anders Ankarlid, CEO of A Good Company (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is your hottest selling product?

Anders Ankarlid: Every new product that we are launching goes up as the new blockbuster. We have an assortment of stone paper notebooks. It’s a replacement for pulp-based stationery products. You take leftovers from the construction industry. You cross the stones. You make it into pellets and then you press it into paper.

The only rationale behind that is that trees are really important to clean up the air, which we need to breathe. Deforestation is one of the major threats to the climate. We are selling loads and loads of toothbrushes and non-disposables.

If you would ask me this question in the next month, our mobile cases will be the next blockbuster. It will be fancy-looking mobile cases completely without plastic. The product will have a circle of systems. When you’re either changing your phone or getting tired of the design, you can send them back to us. We can chop it down and make a new case out of it. We can build a circular system out of mobile cases.

There are nearly three billion active users on smartphones today, and nearly 80% of these are using some sort of protective case around their cellphones. Most of this comes from bad plastics. We have a roadmap of 25 different products which we are working on now. 

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that you started this company relatively recently. You’re already at over $5 million in revenue. What is the secret of such fast growth?

Anders Ankarlid: One is that we are lucky. It’s a massive trend. We really tagged along with that. Secondly, we are winning a lot being personal. Just to give you an example, e-commerce and retail as a whole have been about efficiency and animosity.

We are acting the other way around. For every customer we have, we are giving them a personal video message telling them how thankful we are, which we really are. Third, we have found a good recipe where we know what type of products we should develop.

We have quite a clear schedule of what to do and what not to do. Since we also make our packaging materials ourselves, we can produce and we can buy in bulk. As long as we can get the products to our fulfillment center, we can be quite efficient and we can use boxes that are good for the environment.

We have done some good things. We have thought of shipping to the US from day one even though we don’t have a fulfillment center in the US right now. We don’t have it currently. How do we get customers to get the products fast without having customs and duties?

We have under about 20% returning customers. So, loads of customers are coming back who are either buying the same product or experience another product. We can also show them new options every time they come back.

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