Tell us about your career!

I come from an academic family, basically everyone is at the university in different fields – even my grandmother, which I always found very inspiring. So I was studying Chinese in the university in Munich and living in a 10 m2 student home – when we got internet access. I  think I stayed up for 24 hours straight and just googled opportunities. I found an internship at a fashion PR agency in Berlin, applied, got in and decided to drop everything to move to Berlin. I worked there for 4 years with great designers such as Raf Simons, so I got very lucky.

I then co-founded a PR agency when I was 26. We had a focus on Scandinavian fashion and worked with Stine Goya, Henrik Vibskov, Ganni, Soulland, Wood Wood, Weekday, Monki. Eventually, we had offices in Berlin, Copenhagen, Stockholm and New York. I lived there for five years an came to Stockholm around 2015 to open the office here. We did amazing things, a lot of shows – specifically the Danish designers create real worlds for their shows so it felt like a cultural contribution. I sold my shares from Agency V about 6 months ago, because I wanted to try out something new – I am very drawn to data-driven marketing and was very hungry to work in-house and do a 360 approach for a brand or concept. I am addicted to analytics.

I am today Interim CMO of HON (Her Online Network), which is an app based community for ambitious women to connect and grow in the spirit of intersectional feminism. We are growing at lightning speed and expanding within Europe with events and partnerships right now. We are a very small team, a start-up and we all have to be very entrepreneurial, which I really love. Our founder Aleksandra Avli gives us a lot of freedom and the possibility to own campaigns end-to-end. Again – very lucky.

When you went to high school, what would you never have thought would happened in your career, which has now happened?

I did not even know, that one could work at the intersection of politics, lifestyle and culture. My parents always taught me to absolutely follow my interests, how niche they could possibly be and give my absolute best, which has led me to where I am today. In retrospect, the best decisions where the ones that did not have a specific career purpose behind it, but were just following curiosity.

What would you like to say to yourself when you were in high school?

Career-wise, I would tell myself to be a bit less pressured for time – it all happens at its own pace. And to absolutely follow my interests. Work life is hard, long and exhausting – you need to be genuinely interested in what you are doing.

On a private note – I have been worrying about how to combine family and career from a very young age. I kept on postponing having children in favor of my career and always was insecure about this decision in the back of my head. But then I had a baby last year (at age 40!) and it’s all working perfectly. So I would go back and tell myself not to worry about this, because it worked out in the end.

What are your main values that drive you?

I really want to find out, what drives culture. In my work at HON, we have to act very fast on political and cultural developments – ideally be a voice that is leading a development. I truly believe, that the future of communication needs to be purpose-driven. Brands, that for example did not take a strong stand of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement will regret that in the future.

Why do you want to contribute to Storasystrarna’s cause?

I learned to be civic-minded in my time in NYC and when I moved to Stockholm, I felt incomplete without philanthropic work, so I was very happy to find Storasystrarna. I think, this time in my life is the one I think most often about and so it felt very natural.

How do you make yourself feel better when you are feeling down?

I am a very analytical person, so I try to take all emotion out and look at the problem at hand from a neutral perspective. Is there a reason for feeling blue? Then I try to solve it – even though this can occupy a lot of my brain power. If there is no visible problem – I allow myself to simply feel down once in a while. There is no rule that one should always feel happy, it’s okay to be down sometimes. Then, put things in perspective – they usually don’t look so bad after all.

Lär känna Rike vidare på LinkedIn.