Carlsberg

"We had support and funding from all the Nordic governments, and were given an office in the Finnish consulate on Madison Avenue. They regarded our festival as just the sort of initiative they had been looking for to promote Scandinavia abroad. We took on a couple of staff and somehow our plans, which had started out quite modest, just grew and grew. Soon, we also had sponsorship from some of Scandinavia’s biggest companies — Ericsson, Saab, Ikea, Carlsberg, Absolut Vodka. We were never afraid or too embarrassed to ask for money. In New York we sent out flyers to all the literary associations and put up posters in universities, libraries, theatres. We called up writers, who introduced us to other writers, and soon we found that we had infiltrated New York’s literary set. We became the talk of the town, the crazy Swedes that everyone wanted to hang out with. Even Esquire wrote a piece on us. ‘All this wasn’t particularly difficult to pull together,’ I was quoted as saying. “Everyone was so friendly. Americans have so many friends — friends, very good friends, best friends.’ The tone of the article was one of amused astonishment that a poetry festival should have taken New York:by storm."

"The first bottle of beer came down the line in 1999, a year after the work began. We developed a premium beer called Botch-karev, the Russian word for barrel, and drew up a business plan to take on the market leader, Baltika, owned at the time by Carlsberg and Hartwall, a Finnish beverage company. Our plan was to sell at a 5 per cent discount to the market-leading local brand, but I had a change of plan the night before we started selling and decided instead to charge a 5 per cent premium. So we were the new kid on the block and we had the most expensive beer in an extremely price-conscious country – but it worked. Our advertising campaign was basically to proclaim our beer as the best and most expensive available in Russia. It took off. Botchkarev became a ‘must-have’ in the Russian beer market and we immediately set about cranking up supply and expanding."