Bisons For The Sultan.

This is a piece I wrote recently for a meeting of the Torrevieja Writers´Circle. I was fascinated by the story of this small, specialised Swedish company and thought other people might like to read about it too. So here follows the piece, entitled:

Bisons For The Sultan.



The London Symphony Orchestra has them, you can find them at the Academy of Performing Arts in Hong Kong and now the Sultan of Oman has paid a whopping 1.8 million crowns for them. They are solid, secure, extendable, inclinable, easily moveable, extremely comfortable musicians´ chairs from a small company working from the middle of a forest in Sweden.

The company which produces them, Bison, operates from a typically Swedish red wooden building in the small village of Årjäng in Värmland. It sn´t as big as IKEA with its billions of euros in annual sales . Bison´s profit in 2009 was a mere 9 million Swedish Crowns, which seems like a drop in the ocean by comparison. However, if you consider the fact that Bison has only 7 employees, of whom 2 are the owners, and that the company operates in the very specialist branch of supplies for the music industry, then you have to concede that they´re doing very nicely, thank you.

Bison and Ikea are similar in that they both started in a very small way. Ingvar Kampryd cycled around selling matches at the start of his career.The owners of Bison are Ingegerd Bryntesson and her husband Lennart. She worked as a post office cashier and he was a supply teacher. Their company, which used to sell a variety of things, one of which was a folding axe from Norway, was originally just a sideline. Both Kampryd and the Bryntessons worked from home to begin with until they found their niche. With Kampryd it was furniture while the Bryntessons developed an interest in products for musicians.

It all started with a music stand they liked the look of and decided to retail. Although neither of them are musicians or even particularly musical they decided it was a good item and for ten years they kept their day jobs, sold music stands and supplemented their income by buying and selling berries and mushrooms.

Things took off when, in the mid-nineties, the Berwald Concert Hall in Stockholm contacted them looking for a comfortable, ergonomic chair for its musicians in the orchestra pit. The subsequent collaboration between the professional musicians and the Bryntessons resulted in a chair which is used all over Sweden in concert halls, churches, and colleges of music. It has also become standard in many venues in England, Germany, Norway, Russia, the Baltic States and most recently Oman, where the Sultan´s Symphony Orchestra sits very comfortably while playing for him.

Lennart Bryntesson, like Ingvar Kampryd, has clear ideas on how a good business should be. He is a very Swedish-style boss.He has a Facebook page and writes a blog on the Bison Website, where his photo is, together with those of his wife and the other employees. The building they work in is heated by log burners and all the staff cut the wood for the stoves during working hours. He regards his fellow workers highly and doesn´t believe in inflated salaries for management . Everyone at Bison has the same salary , he and his wife included. It makes things much simpler, and all their jobs are equally important, he believes. He is active in the Swedish Mission Church and 10 per cent of Bison´s profits go every year to charitable projects abroad in countries like Nepal and Ethiopia.

Even if you are not a singer or a musician, you can see from the web site photos that Bison´s products are very high quality.The choir risers look solid enough for a Welsh miners´choir of Pavarotti proportions. Security for the artists who use the company´s products is central to his business idea – hence the publicity photo of a car parked on a Bison stage, patently demonstrating the construction´s strength and sturdiness.

Despite the recession, the company is doing well and after a successful delivery to the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, a recent enquiry from Kansas City makes a breakthrough into the American market closer. Perhaps the Sultan could have a word with Barak Obama?

Great Holiday - Except For the Trent Army.

Got back from my week in Cataluña a while back but haven´t had time to blog as I had a visitor and it took a few more days to sort myself out. So finally I can get down to blogging.

Salou is a great place for families, I must say. Lovely beach, long, safe
promenade for kids and the adventure park, Port Aventura, only a short distance away. It´s also a great centre for seeing other places in Cataluña - Reus, with lovely modernist houses and the Gaudi Centre; Barcelona - masses to see there; the Ebro Delta, a fascinating rice-growing area and a wonderful wild bird area; Cambrils - a picturesque town full of seafood restaurants - just to name a few. Plana, the local bus company had lots of tours at really good prices and some were guided by very interesting, profesional people of different nationalities.

The hotel was good and there was plenty of really nice food. So it should have been perfect. Trouble was, my holiday coincided with the annual SalouFest. This has apparently been held for the last 10 years. Thousands of British University students decend on the town, ostensibly to be doing sports but from what I observed they were there first and foremost to get totally, senselessly, drunk.

We had 350 of them at our hotel. The worst ones called themselves the Trent Army and were from Nottingham. The restaurant looked as if demented monkeys had been in there when they left it for the other guests. We were actually advised by the Head Waiter not to go in until he and his staff had had time to clean up after them.

Every evening from about 11pm they were outside on the street making an unholy racket, some of the lads urinating, some- both boys and girls- stripping down to the bare essentials, until the coaches carried them off for an evening in the discos. Then it all started again from 2-3 am onwards as they came back , this time lots of them so drunk that they were vomiting on the buses and in the street outside the hotel. I saw one girl collapsed on the pavement, totally out of it, who was taken away by police and ambulance. (One newspaper report said there were 60 cases of alcohol poisoning treated at the hospital).

It was widely reported in the Spanish press and on TV and I felt ashamed on their behalf. They may think it´s great to reel about shrieking at the top of their voices but most of the Spaniards in the hotel (both guests and staff) had a pretty poor opinion of them. I don´t think my hotel was a a special case. There were thousands of them, all over Salou, creating mayhem.

I can´t help but wonder if the money made by the bars and restaurants is sufficient to outweigh the aggravation felt by the service staff in hotels, bars and hospitals, not to mention the police and, of course, the ordinary inhabitants of Salou and the other guests in hotels all over Salou who had their holiday soured by these idiots.

So - I did actually enjoy my holiday but was really disturbed at the behaviour of these students and wonder what on earth it will be like in 10 years or so from now when they are in managerial/administrative positions, since they don´t seem to have grasped the basic concepts of consideration and courtesy. Not to mention the damage that quite a few of them are doing to their own bodies by pouring so much alcohol into them.

I´m off on another trip quite soon. This time it´s with other half in tow and we´re going to Mallorca. Just hope the weather´s a bit better by then and that there aren´t too many riotous drinkers about.