Ikea

Sometimes it helps to be bold.

I was introduced to IKEA by a good friend of mine. We found ourselves being handed a brief to make 5 videos that would hopefully lift the morale of their 130,000-strong workforce. But I didn’t feel inspired to make any of them so I just told them that. Stoney-faced silence ensued.

Then I found myself asking “Who started this business and why?” As they answered my questions I began to get more and more intrigued and the solution came. “We just need to tell a story that reminds people what this business is really about - what it was created for and intended to be.” It turned out Ingvar Kamprad’s founding vision was ‘To make a better life for ordinary people.’

So we ended up making a kind of parable without a single piece of IKEA furniture in the whole film.

It set my course for the next 10 years, where I found myself interviewing the founders of some great British brands and asking very much the same thing - how did it all start and why?