Hi everybody. I'm Nicola Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Southern World Fund, and today I'm really thrilled to welcome Jesper Broodine, the CEO of IKEA.

Now, IKEA, as you know, runs this iconic blue and yellow stores that have transformed perhaps your living room, but for sure, hopes worldwide.

And they brought a slice of Scandinavian design to almost

900 billion visitors every year. Wow. That's quite something. Well, that's quite something.

Thank you for the opportunity, Nikolai, to be part of this incredible podcast. And thank you

for doing the commercial for IKEA, so I don't have to hear.

Thank you for doing the commercial for IKEA, so I don't have to. Yes, bro, I would love just to go visiting a store with you.

So can we just put on our customer hat and let's go into an IKEA store? So we enter the

door. What is the first thing we see? Actually, it's interesting. Since I had the pleasure to work

a very close thing by Kamprada, founder for many years, walking a store with him, I realized that

there is nothing left to chance, so to say.

So the first thing you will actually experience coming to IKEA is a person.

In a time of AI and digital revolution, it could be quite interesting that we believe that

nothing can replace that human first impression when somebody greets you and that somebody will also hand

you a bag, which was Ingvar's, of course, inside that if we hand out bags, you will begin your

shopping even sooner. So that is both a friendly gesture and a smart commercial trick from

IKEA. And these are not small bags.

These are pretty big ones, right?

The blue ones.

Well, the blue bags have, we used to yellow bags when you are inside the store and then you replace it with blue when you leave.

The blue bags have become iconic.

And I think in hundreds of millions of households, they serve for moving things as laundry bags and whatnot.

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