Johnny Austad

"For Johnny Austad, Gresvig was a saga that made him a multimillionaire. When he turned 40, he bought himself a Harley Davidson motorcycle, and he made the roads in Inner Østfold unsafe. But only for a short while, because soon after, he was paralyzed in half of his face. The muscles in his face couldn't handle the wind, so he had to stop riding motorcycles. Instead, it was back to business, as they were now looking for more brands, and Austad had no doubt when he spoke with Gjelsten and Røkke: As a customer, he had experienced the Mosse-company Helly Hansen up close, and there was much that could be improved. "If you are going to buy a new brand, it must be Helly Hansen," said Austad. In Austad's eyes, Helly Hansen did everything wrong. Instead of making what customers wanted, they made products that suited production. They held a world-leading brand, but only had products for bad weather – a type of weather that almost only existed north of the Arctic Circle. Orkla CEO Jens P. Heyerdahl had also noticed the pupil's good handling with Gresvig. It was Orkla that owned Helly Hansen, and Heyerdahl knew all too well that they had never managed to get things running smoothly. Helly Hansen was one of the last textile factories to move production from Norway to Portugal, and when the rest moved on to the East, Helly Hansen was left with a large Portuguese factory. Something was fundamentally wrong, the Orkla CEO understood."

"The smile froze after a few days, when Johnny Austad joined the conference call for the Brooks management for the first time. Now the bureaucracy and paperwork were over, Austad demanded results. "And if you don't deliver as promised, I will come over and drink your blood," was the message. "I wanted to signal that we were Vikings," he smiles retrospectively. Austad's next move was to attack the management with an axe, move Brooks to Seattle, and hire one of Nike’s top people, Helen Rockey. The new boss was known as "the rocket" among friends because of her skiing skills. In record time, she had developed Nike’s sales of T-shirts from 60 million a year to almost a billion."

"How could Røkke replace the boss at Helly Hansen? "It wasn't that difficult. There was just one man who needed to talk to two people," says someone closely connected. The outcome was that RGI bought half of Helly Hansen for 125 million, and at the same time made a transfer agreement between the directors. For an appropriate severance pay in the million class, they agreed to switch jobs. Thus, the systematic Gyrd Skråning went to Askim, while Johnny Austad took over Helly Hansen in Moss. And when RGI shortly thereafter completely sold out of Gresvig, Gyrd Skråning disappeared off the sidelines for RGI's part."