•  Fair warning - I have changed different parts of this story at different points over the ten year lifetime of our busines. As a result, it reads sort of like a ransom note made from mis-matched newspaper and magazine clippings.

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.  We have been doing it for 10 years now, and while it's certainly a struggle at times, it's a great way to try and make a living.

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 style 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 - next paragraph.  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 happy 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.  We don't buy from them.  

The furniture we make in our Minneapolis workshop is all done piece by piece, from selecting the raw slabs of lumber - all either FSC (Forestry Stewardship Council) certified or reclaimed wood - for each project to hand milling, hand sanding, assembling and shipping.  It's all custom work done to the buyer's sepcifications based on our loose design ethics of a sort of modern-organic-mid-century appeal.

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.   That's the long and the short of our "green" section.  We don't try to hit people over the head with it,  but you will find it in everything we do.

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.

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 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. 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. 

Over the last two years we started producing furniture ourselves in our warehouse.  As we got better and better at it, and more and more orders came in, our workshop space got bigger and bigger, and our showroom space got smaller and smaller.  Now we have no showroom:  the warehosue is split into storage of the pieces we buy overseas, our furniture workshop and a packing and shipping area.  No more showroom, no more retail hours - now everything for local business is by appointemnt and everything else is done on line or on the phone.  Having been in retail ever since college, no longer having retail hours has actually been a great change.  Don't get me wrong, we still like it when people wander in un-announced, and we have  asign on our door saying as much, but not having retail hours has freed us up to do so many other things as well as given us a great amount of focus on our sourcing around the world and our furniutre production here in the warehouse.

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. It's a very sad and difficult sentence to write here - that Lisa's mom died in early 2008 from cancer.  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 at Gustavus Adlophus in St Peter, Minnesota. They met at the Gustavus bookstore.  Jan and Anders were married for 50 years. 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 dad is retired from Gustavus Adolphus College and has become a photographer with quite a few exhibitions under his belt.  Once he at long last gets his web site up and running - no subtle hint here Anders - I will post a link to it.  He really shoots some good stuff from places ranging from the Galapagos, the North Woods of Minnesota to the Berber tribes of the Sahara to Lapland summer migrations.

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.  He is now three (As evidenced in the last photo below), and no longer struggles with calculus and still likes to be thrown up into the air, unless of course, he doesn', still jumps in puddles, reads stop signs, swims a lot, still jumps on the parts, runs into things with more speed,  is on the verge of riding a bike and has given me the greatest welcom home from a trip I have ever -  or will ever -  have (written about at the end of this blog).

 

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 steady 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.  So when I say the business wouldn't exist without her - it's not meant as some happy lovey-dovey husband wife thing. I really mean it.

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. I also have a Russian 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.