Swedes

How are they so good at certain things? I'm speaking of course of retail, political neutrality and being blonde. IKEA and H&M are Swedish brands that pretty much dominate everywhere these days. If you haven't heard of them by now, you probably live in a barn (barn-dwellers and other rural types make up approximately 95% of my readership).

The CliffsNotes version is that IKEA sells home products and H&M sells clothes.

Couple of interesting tidbits:

IKEA
IKEA is an acronym that stands for Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd -- the founder's first name, last name, house name, and village name (they like to name houses and buildings here -- like today I went to Stornoway House, which is an office building).

IKEA is intricately setup from a corporate structure standpoint which allows them to avoid paying most taxes. They funnel profits through a nonprofit subsidiary and shell corporations. Hmm.

And to add to that, IKEA is also parent company to the world's largest charitable organization, the INGKA fund. At $36B, this fund is $3B larger than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But somehow, they don't really give that much money away. Some approximations put their charitable contributions for 2004 at $1.7M, which is lots less than the fund would make on interest in a given year. To put this in perspective the Gates Foundation gave roughly $1.5B in 2005.

But they do make a nice coffee table. And they are ecofriendly and like to promote sustainability and environmental design. And Swedish women make me blush.

H&M
Another acronym, this one less memorable. Basically H stands for Hennes, which is Swedish for "hers", and M stands for Mauritz, which is the first name of the guy who bought Hennes.

Nothing much else interesting about H&M it seems. They did once employ Kate Moss as their spokesmodel, but dropped her after she appeared in photographs snorting cocaine. She's still really the most famous non-Royal in London based on my brief experience.

Their clothes are cheap and fashionable, but not as cheap as they used to be. But dare I say MORE fashionable? I dare.

ABBA
Is also from Sweden.