The story behind Brandsdal Group.

– Before Einar Øgrey Brandsdal founded the company Euronor on 10 April 1997, he had dropped out of a real estate broker programme at BI in Oslo, had a four-day military career at Madlamoen, spent a couple of years as general manager of his grandfather’s company, Einar Øgrey Skjellsand, and held a string of odd jobs.

Einar is one of seven siblings, the son of Inga Helene Øgrey and Olav Brandsdal. He is the second in a line of six boys and one girl: Paul Christian the eldest, then Einar, followed by Anders, Even, Per, Lisa Helene and Elias. He was born on 4 December 1975.

His siblings have described him as a peculiar nerd with odd hobbies when he was young. While they were busy with football, gymnastics and other activities, Einar preferred walking in the woods once his homework was done. He also spent a great deal of time in his room with his Commodore 64, and later an Amiga 500.

Beyond that, he loved studying his stamps with a magnifying glass, eagerly organizing them and filing them neatly into catalogues. His favourite books at the time were the Skanfil catalogues. He could sit for hours calculating what each stamp was worth and estimating the value of his collection. For many years he was a member of the Kristiansand philatelist club, which met at Høyres hus in Kristiansand. He was active in the youth choir Nota-Bene from Vågsbygd, which gathered around 150 young people every Thursday under the direction of Kjerulf Samuelsen. Einar was also active in the Christian student group at Fiskå school, where Øystein Kristoffer Nilsen led the way and Einar Øslebye and Dag Vige were involved.

Einar grew up in Åsane in Vågsbygd, a district of Kristiansand. He first attended Åsane school, then Vågsbygd school, and later Fiskå lower secondary school.

Einar was a very shy boy until he started upper secondary school. Nor was he particularly good at school.
After his third year of primary school, his teacher suggested at a parent meeting that his parents should consider having Einar repeat the third grade and join Svein Oscar’s class. In the end, it never came to that.

Einar was small for his age for much of his childhood. His younger brothers Even and Anders were for several years just as big as Einar, even though they were one and three years younger. As a result, the three boys got into fights almost daily.
Today they are best friends, and that goes for all the siblings.

Einar has no formal education beyond upper secondary school. He failed Norwegian in 1995 and had to wait a year before he could retake the subject. In 1996 he finally passed his final exams, though with grades that hardly give you goosebumps.

After two weeks at Kristiansand Cathedral School he chose to transfer to Vågsbygd upper secondary school instead. There, Einar got into a quarrel with his Norwegian teacher Sørgaard, which ended with Einar being expelled. After a conversation with the principal, it was agreed that Einar would apologize to the teacher and back down, which he did. He was soon allowed back, and Sørgaard and Einar put the quarrel behind them and became good friends.
He spent a year there before going to the USA as an exchange student. He first attended Cocalico High School in Denver, Pennsylvania, and then moved on to Bishop McDevitt High School in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Einar was a senior in high school and holds an American graduation diploma.

After his stay in the USA, Einar moved to Gimle upper secondary school in Kristiansand, majoring in business economics. His favourite subject was geography. He was a “blue russ” graduate in 1995 and, for a short period, Credo president for the russ celebrations in Kristiansand.
But the most fun classes were without doubt the German lessons with form teacher Mardon Haugland and fellow German students Bjarne Hansen, Preben Lidi, Jonas Jakobsen, Tor Erik Gudding, Bjørn Eggertsson and Stian Nordahl Sørli. There they often sang “durch für gegen ohne um” and “ich bin ausländer und spreche nicht gut deutsch”.

After upper secondary school, Einar went backpacking with two friends, Terje Nordgarden-Slotte and John Ove Gummedal. Halfway through the trip, in Australia, he showed up unannounced at the Bible school where his cousin Annette Eikhom McCaslin was studying. The school was located in Brisbane and is run by Youth With A Mission. There he found lodging while waiting for his friends, who were still in Indonesia. But for Einar, the stay in Brisbane took a new turn. He became a born-again Christian and chose to return to Kristiansand. He remains a believer to this day, with Jesus as his truly great role model. To Einar, Jesus means everything. It should also be said that Einar is extremely fond of his family and spends a lot of time with his own family, his siblings and his mum and dad. He adores his family and grew up with an enormous amount of love from his parents.

Fun facts!

Einar has appeared on the TV show Reisesjekken on TV Norge, and is probably the only person to have appeared twice. He has also managed to hold his breath for 3 minutes and 20 seconds. During his russ year he was invited onto the TV programme Lønning direkte, appearing alongside the veteran KrF politician Jon Lilletun.

Einar is 1.96 m tall. He has tried the following sports: football, handball, basketball, orienteering, athletics, badminton, wrestling, bowling and gymnastics. He also spent a long time tying flies and playing the piano. He never stuck with any sport for more than a few months at most, and several he tried only once.

Skateboarding, diving and windsurfing were also among his great passions as a teenager, along with snowboarding in winter, and he loved sailing a VG dinghy.

Einar also nearly hit a kangaroo near Hamresanden in Kristiansand when he was around 20 years old. He naturally wondered whether he was seeing things, but it turned out to be true: a kangaroo had escaped from Kristiansand Zoo that same day.

Einar was part of the school patrol at Vågsbygd school in the sixth grade. He has also appeared on TV2 hjelper deg and NRK FBI.
Einar absolutely loves a competition.
Einar is left-handed.

Working career

Before Einar started the company, he had saved some money selling acorns that he picked with his childhood friend Nils Rune Birkeland, along with some income from picking strawberries in a field at Hånes together with Hånes boy Anders Knutson. Once the strawberries were picked and paid for, they were sold by the roadside. As a boy, Einar also sold ready-made flower bouquets around the neighbourhood, together with his childhood friend and classmate Andrè Høibo. They were also avid bottle collectors and spent much of the 80s playing coin-toss games.

He also saved most of what he earned over several summers working at Einar Øgrey Mek Verksted. His first hourly wage was 43 kroner. Einar was hired to weed flower beds and paint, and eventually learned to weld. He also did a fair amount of acid-washing of flanges. While working at Einar Øgrey Mek Verksted he took an asbestos course, and to this day holds a diploma qualifying him for asbestos removal.

For a short period, Einar and one of his best friends, Sølve Valsgaard Høyrem, also bought firewood at Birkeland, which they repacked into small sacks and sold door to door. The two had other ideas as well, and for a while their dream was to import work gloves and lighters from China. They wanted to become like Arnar Hansson from Evje.

At 18, they both went to Denmark to buy used TV sets and VCRs. Beforehand, they had contacted customs to check whether these goods carried import duties, and were told they did not. So they drove through the green lane when they came home from Hirtshals, and were stopped. What they had not considered was that they had to pay VAT. The goods were confiscated and both received a hefty fine. An expensive lesson in not finding out how importing works.

Einar also tried his hand as a car importer, buying a Ford estate car from Germany together with Eivind Holst and Frode Kjetså, which was resold. It ended with that one car.

In addition to the money saved from his summer jobs, he had also set aside part of the wages he earned as a telephone salesman at TeleTeam in Skippergaten in Kristiansand, where his job was selling scratch cards for organizations including the Norwegian Society for Sea Rescue (Redningsselskapet).

After his time as a telephone salesman, Einar worked for a period as a vacuum cleaner salesman for Arvid Nilsen and Kirby vacuum cleaners. Even though every day started with singing “I got Kirby in my head, I got Kirby in my feet, I got Kirby all over me”, it was no great success. After several weeks, the tally was zero vacuum cleaners sold and no income. He actually lost money by having a steady job, as the pay was 100% commission-based. Einar had to shelve his vacuum cleaner career and look for new opportunities.

In 1996, Einar started selling aerial photographs for Kenneth Bjørkhaug. He and Kenneth commuted daily between Tvedestrand and Kristiansand, making a living as door-to-door salesmen. The job was commission-based, just as at TeleTeam and Kirby. Door-to-door sales, however, was something Brandsdal was good at. He enjoyed this kind of work very much and was well paid for it.
Unfortunately, in the winter of 1996 they began running out of aerial photos to present at the doors, because the company he worked for had photographed too few houses the previous spring and summer. There was no basis for knocking on more doors. Einar once again had to find himself a job, as further education was out of the question. He was tired of school, and it gave him no positive energy.

He did give the real estate broker programme at BI in Oslo a try, probably because his friends Erik Frøysnes and Preben Monen thought it was a good education. It lasted only a few weeks before Einar threw in the towel. He liked neither the programme nor the city. When he started travelling home on Thursdays and back to Oslo on Tuesdays, he might as well quit.

And that was when his grandfather Einar Øgrey gave him a unique chance. At the age of 19, he was allowed to try his hand as general manager of Einar Øgrey Skjellsandindustrier AS, a small company selling shell sand. Shell sand is used for liming acidic soil and watercourses, and as an additive in chicken feed to help produce stronger eggshells. Shell sand has many uses and is found along the entire Norwegian coast. He loved the job his grandfather had given him.

Within a short time of working for his grandfather, Einar built the company its own website. He entered all the customers into a PC, making it possible to invoice them faster and more efficiently by computer rather than by typewriter. He used Guru Software, known today as Mamut. Einar had an enormous interest in computers while working for his grandfather.
The dream he had carried since he was 10 years old began churning in his head again.

Einar had always had a strong desire to run his own business, just like his grandfather and mentor Einar Øgrey had done. The story of his grandfather, who had saved 6,000 kroner as a sailor and built one of the largest privately held companies in southern Norway, Einar Øgrey Mek Verksted, was a constant source of motivation.

Grandfather Einar Øgrey and “little Einar”, as his grandfather called him, spent a lot of time together, often at weekends when Einar was in primary school. Saturdays would often start with his grandfather knocking on Einar’s window around 7 in the morning, calling out:
“Eia”, are you awake? Yes, I’m awake, I’m coming out. A few minutes later they would get in the car and go fishing. As always, his grandfather brought a pre-made packed lunch on these fishing trips. The lunch consisted of the same thing every time: two thick slices of bread with a huge layer of margarine that had melted at room temperature on his kitchen counter, topped with thick slices of brown cheese cut with a bread knife.

After the fishing trip they went straight home to grandmother, who made a fish lunch from the catch. Then there was often a trip out to Einar Øgrey’s workshop, where his grandfather showed “little Einar” all the jobs they were working on. And often “little Einar” was allowed to pick up some bottles, which he returned for the deposit, putting the money in the piggy bank he had been given by the former Sørlandsbanken. He remembers the piggy bank well: a kangaroo with a scarf.
Grandfather and “Eia”, or “little Einar”, shared a truly unique bond. Right up until his grandfather passed away a few years ago, Einar describes him as one of his very best and closest friends.

Euronor AS

On 10 April 1997, Einar made up his mind. By then, he had several times talked about starting his own business with his friends Lars Greipsland and Tor Magnus Storaker at Leiehengeren in Vågsbygd, where Lars worked. They too said: why not just do it?

And that was that.
The founding meeting of Euronor AS, with its visiting address in Birkedalsveien in Søgne, became a reality.
His grandfather Einar Øgrey had given him the green light and encouraged him to start out on his own, even though Einar still had his day job with his grandfather.

At the outset, Einar had no strategy for what the company would actually do. The most important thing was simply to get started with something; time would show what it would become. But importing from China and Hong Kong was tempting, and the magazine Hong Kong Enterprises was read avidly. He had been given a few copies by Terje Haldorsen, who himself ran an import business out of a red shed at Lumber in Vågsbygd.
The goal in founding the company was that he finally had the opportunity to import goods from abroad and resell them, and, in time, the chance to make a living from it. Einar wanted to be independent.

A few days after Einar had submitted the application to the Brønnøysund Register Centre, a letter arrived at his grandfather’s business address. It was handed to Einar while he was having dinner with his grandparents.
He could hardly wait to open it. On the way home from his grandmother (Anna Øgrey) and grandfather to his own flat, his eagerness grew so great that he pulled into a bus stop at Blørstad in Vågsbygd to open the letter. Inside lay a green certificate of registration, a document proving that Einar was now 100% owner of the company Euronor.
Einar was over the moon as he read the certificate.
YES, FINALLY, he thought, now I am finally under way with my dream.

Einar was 21 years old at the time, and the week before he had just started dating his now wife, Mette. Together they have three children, two girls and a boy, two of whom are twins: Bertine, Lykke & Felix. A few years earlier, Einar had asked Mette out on a date, and she said yes. But Mette called back shortly afterwards to say she was going away to be an au pair in the USA, and just wanted to mention that she would only go out with him as a friend. Einar was terribly offended and said in that case, never mind. He was miffed.

It was only a few years later, at Hovden in 1997, that Einar got the chance to get to know the girl he had been so taken with a few years before. By coincidence they bumped into each other at the former nightclub Checkpoint at Hovden. Einar invited Mette onto the dance floor, and a few weeks later they were a couple. They soon moved in together and married in 1999. They struggled to have children, and only after 5-6 years of IVF attempts did their first daughter, Bertine, arrive, followed a few years later by the twins Lykke & Felix. The family spends a lot of time together and is an active family with plenty of activities and exercise. Einar loves his family and is incredibly proud of his wife and children.

He was very proud of the company name Euronor, his own abbreviation of Europe and Norway, hence Euronor.

Shortly after the start, his friend Ronny Tolfsen joined him on the ownership side. Before long they landed Rolf Sannes and Magne Moy of Deliktasseservice as a customer, delivering around 10,000 digital pets to the company. As a result, the first year of operations ended comfortably in the black. But then everything ground to a halt.

Einar then had an idea to buy alcopops from Sweden. He brought Alf Helge Holtskog along on a drive to the neighbouring country and imported a whole truckload of the goods. The buyer was Paal Lidi and Price Club. The product sold at a furious pace until the police banned it. Einar got a phone call from Paal and had to take everything back. After this, Einar bought out his friend Ronny and was on his own again.

Einar also had good support from the bank, then called Kreditkassen. Euronor needed an overdraft facility, and he got help from Tor Erik Suvatne and Pål Ekberg, two young men his own age. The company is still a customer of the bank, which has since been acquired by Nordea. Tor Erik and Pål still have a good relationship with Einar today. And Einar likes to tell them that Nordea made it possible.

In 1999, Einar set to work with renewed energy and established his first online store, named netthandelen.no. He brought his good friend Jahn Fredrik Reme onto the team, and together they worked every evening for weeks to build one of Norway’s very first online stores. They were extremely pleased with the name Netthandelen.
In 1999 there were hardly more than ten online stores in Norway. Komplett.no was one of the few that had started. Other online stores that gave it a try, such as Yatack, Bidlet and Coshopper, are history today.

Jahn Fredrik’s employer at the time, Noroff, was in 1999 one of the few companies in Kristiansand with good internet connections. So that is where they sat in the evenings building the online store, rather than at home on a modem or ISDN line.
The first website was made in FrontPage. Jahn Fredrik designed and programmed, while Einar sat alongside tossing out ideas.
Netthandelen saw the light of day around November/December 1999.

In 1999, people had only just begun talking about e-commerce, and most did not know what it was. A few years earlier, on 20 August 1996, Leif Osvold had told Dagens Næringsliv that the Internet was a flop. In 1999, when Netthandelen was established, mail order was the norm for distance shopping. Ellos was the reigning king.

In 1999, very few people had an internet connection at home. Almost all the orders Netthandelen received came in around lunchtime, from customers’ workplaces. After 4 pm and at weekends, hardly anyone browsed the web and ordered goods.

There was also great uncertainty among customers in 1999 and the first years of the 2000s about whether you would actually receive what you ordered online. Many expressed fear of being sent a rock instead of products.

Cash on delivery was the most common choice of payment in the shopping cart. Few dared to pay in advance, and nobody paid by credit card. A few years later, everyone was talking about WAP as the next big thing, but it flopped. Nobody bought products on their mobile phones either, and tablets did not exist.

Gambling problems

Einar also struggled greatly with gambling problems in his childhood and teenage years. Thousands of kroner changed hands between him and his friends as early as age 13-14. It started with the one-krone slot machines that the Red Cross placed in kiosks and shopping centres.

Then came many weekend trips back and forth on the Color Line ferries with his gambling friends. There was no shortage of poker nights either.

One evening when Einar was around 19, after gambling away tens of thousands of kroner at Sørlandets Bowling, he was in such a dark place that he wanted to take his own life. He swallowed every pill he had in his home and wanted to die. But regret came quickly, and his stepbrother Frode Kjetså drove him to the hospital, where his stomach was pumped empty. It was in the nick of time. But even after this, Einar could not put the addiction behind him. While Einar was living with Mette, he twice gambled away all his money, and both times Mette had to put the groceries back on the shelves because there was no money in the account when she went to pay.

This led to his wife telling her mother and siblings about the problems, and Einar felt deeply ashamed. Einar then had two options: either quit on the spot, or Mette would leave him.
Fortunately, Einar chose to put the gambling addiction behind him. It is also important to Einar to make clear that neither before nor after that episode at the hospital has he ever contemplated anything like it. His life has, in truth, been mostly fantastic in every possible way all these years. It was really only those few hours that day that were pitch black; the rest has largely been a bed of roses.

A look back at the challenges of the early days!

In 1999, when Einar and his friend Jahn Fredrik Reme established the first online store, making money was a major challenge.

The company needed investors. And it did not take long before ten local investors from Kristiansand put in a total of 500,000 kroner. They invested just enough to take control of the company with 51% of the shares. It was Einar Roland from Interweb who pulled the strings to land the deal, together with Tor Helge Midtbø and Erlend Jerstad. This made it possible to keep the company’s head above water through 2000 and 2001.

There was a lot of trial and error, but no immediate success. The company therefore entered into a partnership with the online auction site QXL, where Netthandelen sold a range of goods at auction under a concept with a starting price of 1 krone and no reserve price.

Since the online store was struggling to get orders at this point, and the orders came via QXL, Einar and the other shareholders disagreed about the way forward.
Einar then chose to borrow 1 million kroner from his grandfather Einar Øgrey to buy out the shareholders. At the time, the company was insolvent and closer to bankruptcy court than continued operations. Einar well remembers his accountant, Johanne Liane from Merkantil Service, telling him: Einar, I hope you know what you are doing. For your information, the company is not worth a single krone.

At the time, Einar firmly believed that auctions were the future, and he gambled on trusting his gut feeling.

– It turned out to be a good call. In 2000-2001, QXL was a well-known brand with many users.

A mistake turned into success

During the period when Einar was selling goods on QXL, the company had developed a program that let you create auctions in an Excel sheet uploaded through QXL’s pages. There you entered the start and end times for how long an auction would run. At the time, Einar normally sold one DVD player per day. An error in the Excel formula meant that Einar had listed a DVD player with a one-hour duration instead of 24 hours. Since he had no reserve price on the item, he panicked. How on earth would the price climb high enough in one hour compared to a full day? He had to sit down, grit his teeth and hope for the best. Then something completely unexpected happened. The price ended up the same as it normally did over a full day. Hmm, he thought. Let me try once more with one hour. And again, the price was about the same. He had now sold two DVD players in two hours instead of two days. That made Einar realize that auctions did not need to run for so long, and he began switching all the items over to what he called lightning auctions.

Turnover skyrocketed. The very first products were largely fleece blankets, socks and boxer shorts bought from the company Sportif AS in Kristiansand, supplied by Kjetil Marcussen, his father Olav Brandsdal and Svein Ivar Andresen.
Products were also supplied by Strømmes Reklame, where Harald Haugedal was a salesman. The company also bought many goods from Home Design through Kjell Tore Skeivoll, and not least Andrè Kjetså, who works in the company today.
Festival in Søgne was another important supplier in the early days, where Frank Mykjåland supplied trampolines, among other things. The company had also begun importing a great deal from China.

A few years later, Einar acquired GoToScandinavia from Svein Olaf Olsen. They worked together for a year trying to build a travel portal, without any great success. The company changed its name to Nettkjeden and is history today.

He also tried his hand at real estate together with his childhood friend Carl Berthelsen. Together they put up a couple of buildings at Rigetjønn and Sørlandslisten in Grimstad. They came out just about in the black on that venture.

Developed in-house systems

Einar quickly saw that the commissions paid to QXL grew steep as growth took off, and thought the time might have come to end the QXL partnership and pursue online auctions through his own systems instead. After much back and forth, he received an offer from the consulting firm Interweb in Kristiansand to deliver a solution. The offer was 50,000 kroner. Espen Valseth and Øyvind Selbek built the solution. It worked just well enough to get started. But because QXL had considerably more customers and traffic, there was little early sign that this strategy was a smart one.

Little traffic and few customers meant that Einar came home to his wife several times considering giving up.
I’ll give it one more week, he would often tell his wife, before potentially throwing in the towel for good and getting a regular job instead. His wife Mette was extremely patient and wanted him to keep trying one more week. She knew how much it meant to Einar. Week after week he came home saying he saw a few bright spots, and got his wife to agree that he had to try yet another week. Eventually, things took off.

In 2003 the business really began to grow at record speed, and Einar started hiring his own system developers to build a proprietary e-commerce system. He wanted to be free of dependence on others. The systems were rewritten three times before they worked optimally.

Dag Øyvind Godtfredsen, IT director at Brandsdal Group, explains that as the company evolved, a desire and a need emerged to keep both the knowledge of and the ownership of the systems in-house.

– In the beginning, we developed technical solutions designed for sales through online auctions, as well as solutions for both purchasing and inventory management, he explains.

The IT department accordingly developed a system tailored to this.

– Today, our systems for e-commerce, warehousing, marketing and logistics are gathered on one and the same platform, all developed by our in-house system developers. This has given us unique in-house expertise in e-commerce and all the areas it involves, Godtfredsen explains.

Søgne – Høllen Vest.

In the early days, and in the year 2000, the company was based at Fiskåtangen in Vågsbygd, Kristiansand, on the second floor above the Røinås car dealership, in an office of just over 100 square metres. The agreement was made with then general manager Sveinung Hovstad.

When Einar saw that turnover was seriously taking off on QXL, he found himself in a situation where he actually had to start hiring. The very first employee besides himself was his own cousin Pål Inge Brandsdal. But it did not take long before he realized he could not afford it. Pål Inge had to find something else to do. There was not enough money to pay both Einar and his cousin. Einar and his wife Mette therefore had to live on her salary from KST Shipping.

During the period when Einar was completely alone and had full control of the company, he was in his element.
The days were long, from early morning to late evening, every day of the week. No time off. But my goodness, how he loved it. He felt free, able to run the company exactly as he saw fit without having to discuss things with or accommodate others. Exactly as his grandfather had recommended from day one: run it alone.
The work was a joy, and he never thought of it as exhausting.
This was the beginning of a great upswing.

At that time he did everything himself. He printed all the orders and then packed them. He handled customer service, took phone calls, ordered goods and more. Einar describes these as extremely fond memories. When he meets young entrepreneurs today who are in the same phase he once was, he lights up with joy.

As Einar worked alone and got things systematized, turnover picked up again after the dip that followed the move to his own platform. He once again needed more help. His grandparents were never hard to ask, and they regularly came by to collect rubbish and burn the cardboard boxes he did not use. They also helped carry ordered goods up to the second floor, as there was no lift. In 2001 the company started making money again. So once more he could afford to hire people.
He then hired yet another cousin: Frank Eikhom.

And not long after that hire, the company found itself in a new situation..
It had grown so much that the premises at Fiskåtangen had become too small.

Once again the rescue was his grandfather, who was always ready to help. I have a plot available in Søgne and I will have a new building put up for you in record time, his grandfather said.
A few months later, a brand-new building stood ready in Søgne, a full 250 square metres. Einar was as proud as a peacock. Now he could finally relax and keep growing.
That led to even more hires.

The first employees

Bjørn Stien was hired as general manager, Jan Marius Bakke – warehouse, Fehmi Hamiti – warehouse, Arne Klungland – warehouse, Kjetil Hag Tellefsen – warehouse manager, Arve Undheim – warehouse, Preben Falkum as buyer, and his brother Even Øgrey Brandsdal as logistics manager.
Quite a team.
Bjørn took over all accounting and payroll.
Kjetil was responsible for production at the warehouse.
Preben handled all purchasing and was the one who travelled to the Canton Fair in Guangzhou, China, to find the products the company needed. Even handled the dialogue with the bank, made sure goods were customs-cleared correctly and kept the liquidity in order.
Even was also the one who, in a stroke of genius, saved the company an enormous amount of extra work by sending orders to customers instead of invoices. That way they avoided having to credit everyone who did not pay. Sending an order confirmation instead saved a mountain of extra work. Fond memories from a time when it was just a bunch of young people in their mid-20s with essentially no work experience. They simply tested, attempted, tried and failed.
There was no professional e-commerce community at the time either, so they just had to be creative. It should also be mentioned that there was an extreme amount of laughter and humour at work. Almost daily, someone stood behind a door to scare someone else, just so the “scarer” could get a good laugh. You were never safe from who might be hiding behind the doors. Einar particularly remembers Jan Marius Bakke as the one who got scared most often.

Linnegrøvan – Søgne

After four months in the new warehouse, it too became too small. He found it embarrassing that he could not gauge the company’s needs and the right warehouse size.
Grandfather, he said, we need more space. What do we do now? No problem, I will sort it out for you, he said. The fact that he had put up a new building and only got four months of rent out of it did not seem to worry Einar’s grandfather.
Einar was lucky once again, as his grandfather had a vacant 1,500-square-metre space available at Linnegrøvan in Søgne that could be taken over immediately. It just required first removing some machinery bolted to the warehouse floor – drills, press brakes, lathes and so on.

So it was time to move again. It would not take long before even this began to get too small for a company growing at record pace.
A new warehouse building was built because of the enormous growth. Growth that went from 4.6 million in 2001 to 16.8 the following year, and then up to 91.6 million in 2003.
So it was back to Høllen Vest and a new 5,000 square metres. Netthandelen grew so fast that it became the Gazelle winner of the year in Vest-Agder. In addition, Einar was awarded the prize Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2004.

Mjåvann Industrial Park

But the building at Høllen Vest also quickly became too small and was bought by SeaFront. Morten and Tommy Årikstad came by to have a look at it. A few hours later they called and said: we’ll take it. His brother Paul Christian was also part of the purchase of the building.
Netthandelen set course for the Mjåvann industrial estate and built a new 13,000-square-metre warehouse in 2007. It was owned jointly by Kjetså Eiendom and Brandsdal Eiendom, who later sold it on to Union.
The company has been at Mjåvann ever since, moving into a new building close by in 2017. The building is owned by Brandsdal Eiendom AS.

Brandsdal Group AS – today, 2020

Brandsdal Group AS today runs the online store Netthandelen, formerly Norway’s largest online auction site, in addition to the cosmetics stores BliVakker.no and Cocopanda.

– BliVakker.no was established in Norway in 2007 and has seen solid growth every year since. In 2012 we also ventured abroad, establishing Cocopanda in Denmark in 2012, in Sweden in 2014, and in Finland and Germany in 2016, with Austria and Poland shortly after. The plan is to expand into the Netherlands during 2021.

The group had a total turnover of about 930 million kroner in 2019 and expects a turnover of about 1.2 billion in 2020.
The company today has about 200 employees, with a head office in Kristiansand housing both the administration and the main warehouse, as well as 20 employees at a warehouse in Flensburg, Germany.

BliVakker.no is today the group’s largest business. Cosmetics is also the company’s most important focus area.

BliVakker.no had a turnover of 499 million kroner in 2019 and is Norway’s largest online beauty store. At the same time, BliVakker.no’s international sister company, Cocopanda, is gaining a real foothold.

– In 2017, Cocopanda was named the fastest-growing online store in Sweden, despite being run from our head office in Kristiansand. Cocopanda has also been named beauty store of the year in Sweden and Finland several years in a row. In 2020, Cocopanda was named newcomer of the year among all Polish online stores.

From auction to online store

The transition from auctions only to both auctions and e-commerce in 2007 has become a milestone for the group, and Lene Johansen, sales and marketing director, says the ambitions are even bigger.

– The arrows have only pointed upwards since we also started a pure online store and established BliVakker.no in 2007. In addition to now being the country’s largest online beauty store, BliVakker.no has been named Customer favourite of the year online two years in a row and has also received the award Sørlandet Company of the Year.

In spring 2017, the company moved into a new head office in Kristiansand, housing both the main warehouse and the administration. The new warehouse is state of the art, totalling 19,000 square metres across two buildings.
Everything is thus in place for further growth.

– Our vision is to paint Europe pink, by selling both our own and others’ quality products online to customers both in and outside the Nordics, says Johansen.

A fun journey

Einar says the journey so far has been absolutely fantastic.

He believes his colleagues have found a formula that works well, while also working strategically to find new business models and even smarter ways of working. E-commerce is an industry in constant change, one he wants them to stay at the forefront of, and at the same time he believes the company should be a good, safe and, not least, fun workplace for its employees. He looks forward to the next step into the future.

One of the things Einar enjoys most is seeing other people succeed. Seeing people who have taken a knock in life get back on their feet. Einar loves celebrating people who perhaps go unnoticed, typically the everyday heroes of society. Einar is of the opinion that to succeed today you need a fair bit of luck. But most important of all is having a loving family backing you up, and then comes one of the most important things of all: the people you attract. You have to bring in the right people, people who wish you well. Team players, not egoists. When you find people who understand that teamwork is the recipe for success, and colleagues who do not take the credit alone but share it with others, then you are well on your way.

Einar also believes it is important to have fun and achieve good results, but we only have one life on this planet. Use it to make life as good as possible for others and for yourself. We must be able to take pleasure in others’ successes; even our competitors deserve a thumbs up when they are better. It can feel difficult and unnatural to praise those you compete against, but he believes it is important to practise.
In the long run it pays off, and the more you practise, the more natural it becomes.

Brandsdal Group’s current and former companies:
* Euronor established April 1997.
* Netthandelen.no established December 1999.
* First auction on its own platform 16 August 2002.
* fiskeglede.no created in 2005, since sold.
* Gitarhuset.no created 18 May 2016, now sold.
* BliVakker.no started as a department within Netthandelen in 2007 and was established as a separate company in 2009.
* Cocopanda.dk established in 2012.
* Cocopanda.se established October 2014.
* drlykke.no established 2014, now closed.
* Brandsdal of Norway established 2015, now closed.
* Cocopanda.fi established January 2016.
*Cocopanda.de established September 2016.
*Ingarden.no established 2017, today part of netthandelen.no
*Cocopanda.at established February 2018.
*BliVakker Markens established May 2018.
*Cocopanda.pl established November 2019.
*Cocopanda.nl to be established Q1 2021.