Importance of company DNA

Morten Grabowski Kjær was a police officer when he and his wife became parents to twins. They couldn't find a single webshop that carried everything they needed — not Zalando, which felt too overwhelming, but something more like a trusted edit. Maybe 20 body stockings in the right colours, not thousands. So they built Luxusbaby, which turned 11 this year.

The operational choices they made early defined the company. Customer service was open until 10 or 11 PM — because that's when parents are actually online. At 1,000 orders per day, the team still wrote personal notes in every package, addressed to the customer by name, referencing the specific product they bought. The Korea story is a good illustration: when Morten noticed organic orders coming in from South Korea, he hired a Korean employee whose only job for two months was to call those customers and understand them. A whole market followed.

Growth brought its own problems. By the time Luxusbaby had 200 employees, there was no formal structure and no five-year plan. Morten and his wife were running everything themselves. Selling a stake to CoolShop brought in the board, the department structure, and the major system overhaul — new webshop, ERP, PIM — that now underpins the next chapter.

But throughout the conversation, Morten keeps coming back to the same thing. Not the systems, not the headcount, not the markets — the DNA. When you're small, it lives in everything you do almost automatically. When you scale, you have to actively work to keep it alive. The companies that lose it, he says, just become another big one.