If we’ve ever crossed paths, you probably know that I spent some of the most formative years of my adult life living in Stockholm, Sweden. I moved there in pursuit of a dream that sparked in my heart when I was 11: to someday build a life in Europe.
To some, Sweden is a land of democratic socialism, cardamom buns, progress, and equality – the latter two that are seemingly unmatched in most of the world.
And to most of the world, the country is the land of Ikea, Spotify, and Volvo. Depending on which Swede you have spoken to, you might also believe it to be a land where polar bears wander through the capital city. If that’s the case, I regret to inform you that that is far from the truth. However, you may come across a moose (“älg” – pronounced similar to elk, so there is a common species mix-up).
That is… unless you’re one of many who confuse it with Switzerland… which is, strangely enough, an incredibly common mix-up. So common that Visit Sweden launched a campaign in October 2023 to emphasize the difference between the two countries: “Welcome to Sweden (not Switzerland).”
Cool, but what does that have to do with mountain biking? Besides, of course, the assumption of those from afar that Switzerland seems like a more obvious place for the sport, home to the Alps.
Well, what many don’t know – including die-hard mountain bike enthusiasts – is that Sweden is also home to POC Sports and MIPS: both headquarters I had the opportunity to visit while in my second home for the spring.
A quick note before we dive in! A big thank you to Jenson USA for sponsoring Jeff’s video, and thank you to POC Sports for supplying us both with gear to test and enjoy riding in. Any purchase you make through the links in this essay help to support the creative team at JKW, and we are so grateful for your support! Plus, we love conversation! Please leave a comment below or on the YouTube video if you have any questions or thoughts. Especially if you’ve been to Sweden… I’d love to hear about it!
Stockholm Roots
While Jeff put together epic plans for a video documenting his first time on a downhill bike in over a decade, I wandered one of the most beautiful capital cities in the world – enjoying many a fika, and comparing gluten-free cardamom buns.
As Jeff explains in his video, he spent some of the most transformative years of his childhood riding downhill bikes in his hometown of Santa Cruz. Though on completely different paths, I think it’s fun to notice that for this piece, we both took trips back in time to formative periods of our lives – Jeff, with his childhood; and myself, with the second home I made for much of my adult life.
Now, if you’ve been to Stockholm, you probably are confused as to how the city connects to mountain biking. And rightly so. Much of Sweden’s landscape is relatively flat, because ancient glaciers flattened the terrain. Any mountains you’ve seen in Scandinavia are probably in Norway, or incorrectly represented by Switzerland in movies. There are a number of ski hills around the city (and resorts around the country), but the country as a whole is more well-known for Nordic Skiing.
And, well… on the topic of skiing, that is the beginning of the origin story behind POC.
But before we dive into that, let’s take a walk to Nackagatan, home of POC Sports.
POC Headquarters sits in a large brick building on the outer edge of the south side of Södermalm. It’s a short walk away from the water’s edge, where you can see Hammarbybacken – a 94 meter urban ski hill that sits in the center of the capital city.
Even though mountain biking isn’t the first thing I think of when I think of Stockholm, I soon learned that one of my favourite hiking spots, Hellasgården, is one of the local favorites when it comes to urban mountain biking terrain. If you’re a downhill junkie, you’ll be disappointed, but cross-country lovers… rejoice! The undulating hills and enormous rocks will train your cardio… and if you can manage to climb the massive rock walls, you’ll get in some skill practice too.
And though I haven’t yet ridden a mountain bike in Europe, I felt some quiet satisfaction that I had visited both places that were relevant to POC: Åre, for a photo shoot in 2021, and Hellasgården for a multitude of activities (sauna, photo shoots, hiking, rucking).
Do I think of bikes when I think of Stockholm? Yes. It’s a city that excels in bipedal traffic, with a huge emphasis on caring for the environment. In fact, so much so that I (wrongly) assumed that POC had been built from the road biking sport. But no, POC Sport’s roots are, in fact, in downhill skiing.
94 meters at Hammarbybacken is nothing to brag about when it comes to a ski hill, so this may puzzle you, too. But head a few hours north and you’ll find Åre – a small mountain village, home to world-famous alpine skiing and Scandinavia’s largest lift-assisted mountain bike park.
The numbers look a little different here: 890 meters vertical drop for the winter athletes, and cover 40 downhill and cross-country bike trails for the summer crowd.
Innovation and Mission Statement
The mission behind POC is built on the foundation “to protect lives and reduce the consequences of accidents for athletes, and anyone inspired to be one.”
Stefan Ytterborn (founder of Cake e-mopeds and motorcycles), founded the company in 2004, as a ski dad watching his kids compete, and wondering why gear continued to innovate, but the protective gear did not.
The first years were spent building the future in Saltsjöbaden (home to the biggest racing club in Stockholm, and ironically, the smallest hill), but the company reached global interest when Julia Mancusco won gold at the 2006 Torino Olympics wearing a white POC helmet that stood out from the typical Olympic uniforms.
The Triangle of Safety, Performance, and Design
POC’s philosophy is a balanced combination of safety, performance, and design.
That, and the proclamation that the safest helmet is the one that you actually choose to wear. With that in mind, it has to feel good while also looking good… to be something that you want to have on your head.
The balance between safety, performance, and design is something like threshold training in CrossFit. You push performance in one direction, until it breaks down, and you dial it back. A similar principle can be applied to finding the right balance between this triangle. Put more emphasis on the design, but only to a point that there isn’t a debilitating compromise that causes the triangle to collapse.
The safety and performance are fairly easy to grasp, but what might not be so obvious is that the design is not necessarily to earn styling points. More than anything, it is a byproduct of an engineering process. And Scandinavian aesthetic that people notice around the world? Somewhat of a side effect.
And while there are those happy side effects, the hierarchy always looks like this: protect the head first, then the spine… and then everything else. Limbs are easier to heal than brains.
POC Raises the Standard
In 2007, Scott Macartney crashed at Kitzbühel, resulting in the certified helmet almost splitting in two. POC analyzed the forces and decided that the existing standard was insufficient. Instead of waiting for the FIS (International Ski Federation) to raise the standard, they elevated their own internal bar.
POC’s decision to innovate beyond what already existed paved the way for the FIS to eventually apply that higher standard to their requirement for ski racing.
Their commitment to pushing limits shows up elsewhere: applying MIPS into both snow and bike helmets, early Recco in trail lids, NFC medical chips (“Twice Me”), and the fully recyclable Myelin helmet.
Jante’s Law, Lagom, & Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
I love mountain biking, but what I love more is psychology – and during my time living in Sweden, I analyzed the sh*t out of the culture. Culture is fascinating, and our collective conditioning has an impact on what we build within our respective countries and communities.
Because of this, I was curious about how Damian (an expat from Wales, so also an “outsider”) perceived the limitations and possibilities behind building a globally celebrated company with a Swedish operating system.
But first, let me share a few definitions of these uniquely cultural constructs.
Jante’s Law – “a Scandinavian social code that discourages individual bragging, emphasizes collective humility, and dictates that no one should think they are special or better than others”
Lagom – “just the right amount,” “not too much, not too little,” or “in moderation.” It represents the cultural ideal of balance, fairness, and contentment in everyday life
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – “a psychological theory of motivation introduced by Abraham Maslow in 1943 that ranks human requirements in a five-tier pyramid: physiological needs, safety needs, and social belonging”
When I first moved to Sweden, it was with the romanticized ideals of democratic socialism at the front of my mind. If you’re familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, you know that once you have your basic needs met, you climb the pyramid toward self-actualization. And it’s from this aspiring pinnacle that you build revolutions. Sweden is known for exactly that, with companies like Spotify, Volvo, and Ikea dominating their respective markets.
But my real-life experience with Sweden was a little different. At the time, my focus was on high-performance coaching and entrepreneurship. Though I found likeminded values in the rucking community – especially through shared values with Swedish Rangers – many people I met were not striving for innovation and pushing limits… but quietly content with where they were.
It made me realize that when you have always had everything you need in life, you aren’t motivated to build something new, or something greater. Adversity is, unfortunately, an important ingredient to certain layers of self-development. I wondered: could there be a happy hybrid somewhere between Sweden and the United States? Not so much adversity that you fear becoming homeless because of a hospital bill, but also not having everything ready for you on a platter.
I’m not saying my experience is a universal one. If you’ve been to Sweden, or are Swedish, you may have an entirely different perspective.
When it came to high performance coaching, I met the limitations of lagom and Jante’s Law (also synonymous with “tall poppy syndrome”) head-on. People were hesitant to celebrate their victories, and many didn’t want to push themselves to have more.
Lagom, in theory, is great. We could use a little lagom in America (do you really need five storage units full of junk? Probably not). But I found the mindset frustrating when it came to building innovative business practices, marketing strategies, and potential for clients to want more from their life.
The question I continued to come back to was: is this level of contentment with how things are truly a representation of a higher human quality of life? Or is this contentment creating complacency, and putting blind trust in a government, when that trust actually needs to be earned?
It’s a question that I still don’t know the answer to. In fact, there probably isn’t an answer.
My own time living in Sweden significantly steered the conversation with Damian at POC, as well as the team at MIPS.
So I asked Damian, how does a global company like POC produce high levels of innovation, in a culture that is famous for lagom and Jante’s Law?
His answer reflected some of what I’ve suspected living as an outsider in the country, but not having the full access to the benefits of what that means when you’re born into it.
The social structures and lack of emphasis on trying to stand out as individuals, in fact, gives people more mental space to think differently about the things that matter.
Values around equality, nature, and not doing something simply because “that’s how it’s always been done” are as second-nature as the air you breathe.
📍 Shot in Åre in 2021
The importance of gender equality (another reason I had moved abroad) is reflected in the team; the brand team is approximately 70/30 women-to-men, and stories on the POC Journal are intentionally close to 50/50.
I shared my own frustrations with the lack of female representation in the enduro mountain biking worlds within the U.S., and Damian reflected back that the gender equality in Sweden, and within their own teams, is an attribute that they have to actively remind themselves is not the status quo in the rest of the world. But, seeing it here, it renewed my hope. Yes, I have seen actual evidence that the ratio can change. There is progress somewhere, even if not yet in the States.
This focus on values of meaning rather than striving to look a certain way have also shaped branches of the company: such as their support for Team Amani, as well as the first UCI African women’s team. Branches like that are easy to commit to with internal conversations, because the values are already aligned and lived through everyday action.
How much better would our world be if all companies always circled back to these core values?
Shaking Things Up in the Mountain Biking Industry
Walking out of the POC office, I felt a renewed spring in my step. In less than a week, I met with two companies in which being a woman in the industry wasn’t unexpected or upsetting a ratio of (im)balance.
Having written about independence in a male-dominant sport that continues to be built primarily by and for men, it was inspiring to sit in a room where the default assumption is that women take up equal space in the industry.
Women are a requirement, not an option. And they don’t have to wear a tutu or put on a bro-show, either to emphasize their femininity, or to be taken more seriously. Women, as they show up, are simply enough.
This is not a typical gear review – in part because I have yet to review my gear. But in a world where it’s hard to buy a bad bike, and it’s hard to buy bad technical clothing… I personally believe that the decision to purchase from a brand is less about the specs, and more about where that brand stands when it comes to value, representation and storytelling in branding, and equality.
The difference with POC is built on a story.
Personal Notes on Gear
I’ll be sharing a follow-up article reviewing the gear that both myself and Jeff received to try out. Jeff tested a variety of clothing, helmets, and body armor – featured in his video about his downhill mountain bike experience.
I’ve received similar – a helmet, clothing, goggles, socks, and gloves; but have yet to ride and test them out.
Stay tuned!
And as always, thanks for your support!
Have you been mountain biking in Sweden, or anywhere else in Scandinavia? We’d love to hear about your experience… and any other fun cultural experiences you’ve had on two wheels.
Tack och välkommen tillbaka!
– Savannah 🚲 🇸🇪
