My grandfather Åke was many things before he was anything to do with Indiska. A rally driver for Ford. An opera singer. For a while he sold insurance. Somewhere in between all of that he started importing carpets from Morocco, just because he could, just because he loved beautiful things.
In 1951 he walked into a small shop in the middle of Stockholm to sell some of those carpets. Instead he walked out having agreed to buy the whole shop. That’s how Åke did things. He asked his friends if he could borrow the money that same day, 5,000 kronor ( 500 euros) and had it in hand within 24 hours.
The shop was called Indiska Utställningen. It had been started fifty years earlier, in 1901, by a Swedish missionary named Matilda Hamilton, who had fallen completely in love with the Far East and with India. By 1951 it was full of dusty, beautiful, slightly forgotten handicrafts from the Orient — a concept that needed someone to shake it awake. My grandfather, without really planning to, was that someone.
A few years later, in the mid-50s, polyester swept across Europe and my grandfather hated it. Couldn’t stand the feel of it against his skin. He’d heard that in India they made the most beautiful cotton, so in 1958 he packed a bag and a very rough English and went to find it. What he came home with was more than fabric. He came home with friends and partners who stayed friends and partners for the rest of his life, and a love for India that never once loosened its grip on him.
“That’s really where all of this begins.”
My mother carried it forward from there, and if I’m honest, she’s the one who really shaped me. She took me to India herself when I was young, and I remember watching her sit with suppliers, picking up an ordinary rock or a plain piece of wood and somehow already seeing what it could become. As long as something was unique and had a story, she could find the beauty hiding in it. That eye — the habit of looking twice at things everyone else walks straight past — I got that from her, completely.
For more than thirty years she was also, quite literally, my boss. She taught my brothers and me that everyone is equal, that nothing comes for free, that you work hard and follow what you love and never stop being curious — and that you laugh a lot, always, no matter what. That’s the platform I still stand on.
From that one small shop, Indiska grew into a family-owned chain with around a hundred stores across the Nordics. I grew up inside it — present at breakfast, lunch, dinner, and everywhere in between, the way only a family business can be. I went in at fifteen, weekends and spring breaks, and the day I graduated I never looked back. 
Thirty-three years, doing everything from gift-wrapping to warehouse shifts to sitting across the table negotiating with suppliers who became lifelong friends, the last nine of them as CEO.
When we sold Indiska in 2016, I thought I was closing a chapter. I wasn’t. The suppliers were still there. The friendships were still there. Everything my grandfather had fallen for in 1958 was still sitting right there in my soul, waiting.
“So I built it a new home. Soulosofie was born that same year.”
I wanted to keep exactly what my grandfather and my mother had given me — doing business with heart and mind both. Together with Jayan Nair, a friend I’d trusted for years, I started a sourcing company in India, and we went straight back to the suppliers I already knew and loved to build the first collection. Rickard was my sounding board at the kitchen table in the beginning, keeping his job in marketing, until Soulosofie got its hooks into him too — by 2019 he was in full time, and we’ve shared this obsession ever since.
An assortment where every item has a story. That’s the whole point of Soulosofie, and it always has been — going all the way back to a carpet salesman who went in to make a sale and came out owning a shop, and a mother who taught her daughter to see a story in a plain piece of wood.
Big hug, Sofie
