Björling & Grant was founded in November 1999. Björling is my wife’s maiden name and Grant is my (Ian), last name. I started this business to fulfill a few things in my life. First off I wanted to have my own business. Figuring out what that might be was a bigger challenge than I had thought. It took me a few years to iron it out, but I finally settled on this somewhat loose structure. With a degree in history and a degree in art history, I have always been interested in. . . .history. I wanted to create a job where I could travel to far and away places in search of unusual artifacts and antiques (an Indiana Jones complex I think), and work with local artisans and little cottage industries.

The buying strategy we go after is not all that complicated. First and foremost, anything we buy has to look good and/or have good function. This is not brain surgery or deep philosophical thinking I realize - but it helps us when we are faced with a garish antique that someone is telling us is amazingly rare, or a master craftsman who has cloistered themselves away in some mountain retreat and makes one legged chairs from the visions he has in a self induced coma. If it doesn't look good or have good function, its not much use to us.  No one legged chairs at our place, no matter how old, rare, or who made it under what mental state.

With our antiques we try to buy middle to upper middle end pieces. This makes them on the one hand affordable to a larger number of people, but on the other hand they are still unique. Not only that but we have limited resources ourselves, so when faced with being able to afford to buy two "unbelievably rare" Chang Dynasty porcelains or 50 "medium rare" Burmese betel nut boxes from the late1800's, we choose medium rare.

With new pieces, we go after limited/small batch productions and/or things made in small workshops or in a cottage industry type set up. This in part makes sure that we are not buying things that are mass produced - which opens up a whole other subject involving labor practices and conditions in many of the countries we buy from, not to mention you can buy mass produced things at any of your "big box" stores. Limited and small batch productions imply small workshops with more creative products and happier artisans. In general when it comes to the pieces we buy directly over seas, we are seeing the people who are making our products and we like to see happy people .

Labor practices in many of these countries are a complicated subject with many gray areas. I have written and deleted this section any number of times mainly because I usually end up writing for paragraphs rather than sentences. Suffice to say that these conditions exist for many reasons, and many people are responsible for them, from the factory owners, to the people and companies that buy from these factories, to the end consumer, and to some extent even the laborers themselves. But ultimately when it comes to buying or not buying from a company we don't feel comfortable with, the answer is always an easy one. There have been places that we have decided not to buy from specifically because of working conditions. Not that our not buying from them would make them change their practices, but its not something we need to be supporting.

We have always had a strong green streak in our buying.  We try very hard to make sure all of our product is collected in an environmentally and socially sustainable way.   If it's even questionable, we don't buy it.

Part of the larger goal for this company is perhaps a little idealistic, but I still like to think about it. In traveling to other countries that are far from the minds of many people over in the States -- places like India, Nepal, South America, South East Asia -- I find I am able to bring back a little of their cultures and philosophies. With every piece that I collect, there is some sort of story involving the place that it comes from and the people who made it, whether that was a month ago or two hundred years ago. When each piece leaves our showroom and goes to someone's home, those stories go with it.

I also like to pick places based on countries I think would be cool to travel to. True that's not quite as altruistic as the "its a small world" part above, but it's still a major part of picking where I want to go next.

Now a little price talk.... I try to keep everything pretty close to the wire. Obviously I want to make some money at this, but I really do like to see people being able to afford these pieces. Some of the most rewarding sales are those when I know people have been saving for a couple of months to afford a piece they really like, rather than going off to buy something mediocre right away just to fill an empty space. The thing with this sort of material is it only takes one piece in a room to create a feeling, and it doesn't matter if it's $200 or $20,000, as long as it's something you are in love with. Now admittedly its very exciting for me to sell a very expensive piece, but the smaller pieces give me a great feeling as well. For example the stone market weights - I have a vivid memory of standing in a hidden little spot on an island just off the coast of the rain forest in south west India with my friends Mariam and Basu. I remember looking at these weights and wondering why I was getting them. All I could come up with was they were "cool." The idea that they were such a functional part of every day life in this ancient coastal trading community's market place and would end up in the United States was enough for me. Of course I paid physically when it came time to unload all of the stone I brought back to Minneapolis, but after a couple of days worth of recovery I was all right with that physical price it cost in unloading them from the container (although my brother Sergey might not have been).

At the turn of 2002-2003 we started to work on opening a new retail space in southwest Minneapolis. At our old location we mainly showed all of our imports and had some lighting and leather furniture mixed in. What we were really wanting to do was create a store made up of living spaces. If you can picture a living room setting with a clean lined sofa and club chair, modern looking lighting and a couple unique pieces from maybe Tibet or Northern Thailand - that is the look we are going after in the shop. Now with our combination of more recognizable modern/traditional larger pieces and just one or two pieces of the unusual accessory mixed in, people are better able to see how these pieces from half way around the world really do work in most decors. We started business in the new location in late April of 2003.

In the fall of 2006 I hired Emily Rickert - someone I could have used seven years ago when I started the business.  I don't really know where to begin with all that she does and all that she contributes to the business and general quality of life around here.  Around the same time, I brought on a packing and warehouse guy named Mike Ascher.  I have tried repeatedly to get rid of him, but he keeps on showing up.  In all seriousness, he has the thankless job of managing our warehouse and taking care of all of our order organizing and shipping, and he does is all while whistling a happy tune. It's because of these additions that I feel the business is starting to hum a little - things are getting done, product coming in and actually getting processed, clients talked to, money exchanged and things going out.

 In the fall of 2007 we moved to a large (large for us), warehouse that has three, count them - three - loading docks.  I never had any idea that such a seemingly simple thing as having loading docks could so dramatically change my life.  If I had, I would have placed much more emphasis on them in my liberal arts degree.  So that, and having so much more space, all on one level (the old place had a basement that we had to haul everything down into, and then back up to pack and ship out), has been a great step for our business. 

Part of our new direction as a result of our new location and where we are in general as a business, is getting more into design and production of furniture.  Still very small scale on a production level, but it's a lot of fun for me personally to be finding our own lumber from reclaimed sources around the country and designing it, having it made and finished here in Minneapolis, as well as in the remote locations that we work with around the world.  It truly makes our business one large global family which I like (I'm close to breaking into song right now). 

At this point you are probably wondering why you clicked on the "About Us" link. It's sort of like watching someone else’s family vacation slides. I won’t be offended if you skip out on the rest of this, but I have to mention my family, as they are such a big part of what I am doing.

I grew up in Duluth Minnesota with my sister Fiona and my parents, Mom and Dad. Mom is from Dublin, Ireland and came over to the States in her mid-20’s. Dad is from Inverness, Scotland and came over to get his Ph.D. at Cal Tech in his mid-20’s. They met in California and had always intended to return to Europe to raise a family. Somehow they wound up in Duluth, and the rest is history. Fortunately for me, they would take us back home quite often and, with a professors schedule, we were even able to spend a few years living in Europe on and off.

My wife Lisa grew up in St. Peter, Minnesota. She has two sisters, Jenny and Susie, and two parents, Mom and Dad. Her mom grew up in Iowa (a far away land to those of us in Minnesota), and her dad grew up in Stockholm, Sweden (a little closer than Iowa) and came over to the States in his late teens to go to college. Lisa was also lucky enough to go back and forth to Sweden to visit her dad’s family who all still live in and around Stockholm. For those of you who recognize the name Björling, Jussi Björling was/is Lisa's grandfather. Her folks have a shop in St. Peter named Swedish Kontur Imports.  After four years of dating, 10 years of marriage, we decided to give having a child a shot.  Our son Alex was born August 25th, 2006.  There isn't much to report on him at this stage.  He is cute, does little baby thigs: craps, cries, smiles, tries to say words, teethes, projectile vomits, falls down, gets back up, climbs on stuff, falls off stuff, says more and more words, jumps in puddles, falls on his but in puddles, likes to be thrown up in the air - unless of course he doesn't, struggles a bit with pre-calculus, knows his shapes, some letters, some colors, eats a lot of stuff - some of which he is meant to eat, some of which he isn't, swims a little, has an uncanny knack for managing to walk/jump/land on delicate body parts, likes stereos and runs into things.

An important aside about my wife and her support.  Without her, none of this would have happened.  Her emotional support through the roller coaster of having your own business was and is invaluable.  On the more mundane end of things, Lisa's career made this all financially possible.  She has had a career that seems to be on a stady course up.  With her masters in biostatistics, she started out in a pharmaceutical company, then quickly moved to the University of Minnesota to work in AIDS research (to this day a Google search for Bjorling Grant turns up her name not long after the business'), then from there she went to the company formerly known as Guidant as a manager, running device studies on cardio-vascular devices.  After five years of moving up the scale there, she was brought on as a director at a medium sized start up company - director of clinical research.  The company is bringing to market the only implantable high blood pressure device and she is in charge of the study that will do that - right up to presenting to the FDA.  If this all comes through, it would be a major "decade" event in the medical device world.  So when I say the business wouldn't exist without her - it's not meant as some happy lovey-dovey husband wife thing.  It's real.

So back to the family "slide show."

My sister is married to a guy named Ravi, who grew up in Darjeeling, India and they have a daughter named Tara. Ravi's folks actually live in Australia, but they own a trekking company specializing in trips to India and Nepal (mainly in the Himalayas), and South America. It is through his family that my initial connection with India and Nepal came from. Then my afore-mentioned adopted brother Sergey who is from Petrozavodsk, Russia and his wife Amy from St. Cloud, Minnesota, both of whom during the early years of the business were always on the tough end of unpacking these containers as they came into Minneapolis. Susie (Lisa’s sister) and her husband Steve have helped on the technical and physical side of this business in many ways. Susie provides much needed unpacking energy and Steve, being a numbers man, helps me with the day to day figures and a lot of psychological help (not that I have any "issues").

I also have to mention my cousin Keith in Dublin, Ireland, who asked me why I had no section for relatives who had nothing to do with the business. Of course he then pointed out that if I created a special section for those "nothing to do with the business" people, then by definition they would now have something to do with the business. I told him I didn't want to confuse matters as the whole concept gets a little circularly convoluted, so let's just pretend this paragraph never happened.