Inside Mips HQ: How People-First Culture Built a Market-Leading Safety Brand
I just got back from my second trip to the Mips headquarters in Stockholm. 🇸🇪
The first visit was in January 2019 when we began working together. They had a smaller team and a different office then. This time: over 80 employees, a new headquarters, and a room full of international media from the US, France, and Germany.
I tacked on a couple of personal days to explore the city. Visited every coffee and Fika spot I could find. ☕ If you know, you know.
Here's what stood out to me on this trip:
🧠 Brilliant people making complex things simple.
Mips researchers can walk you through the biomechanics of how brain injuries occur during impact—the rotation, the forces, the milliseconds that matter. Their CVs are stacked — PhDs, patents, decades of research.
But when they explain it, a 12-year-old could understand.
🥐 Group lunches. Generous time off. And Fika!
Not as perks. As a baseline.
Mid-morning and mid-afternoon, the office pauses for coffee and conversation. Not optional — cultural.
I've spent most of my career eating lunch at my desk (still guilty of this). Watching a company actually walk away from their desks twice a day felt almost radical.
🤝 People-first operations.
In every meeting — CEO, engineers, sales, marketing — I kept waiting for the upsell or pressure to generate more revenue. Never happened.
Some media members even asked, "Why not sell this or package and upsell that?"
Instead, they focus on partnering with brands that share their values, engineering new safety solutions, developing technology to reduce time-to-market, building more sustainable products and methodologies, and sticking to their vision: "To reduce head injuries. And save more lives."
They're in helmets for motorcycling, cycling, snow sports, construction, equestrian, and climbing.
Multiple segments. Industry-leading position. They could leverage that to maximize and extract value at every interaction. They don’t.
📈 But they're profitable and growing.
They track the right metrics, close deals, and expand their reach. It's just not the only thing that matters — or even the first thing.
Somehow, by prioritizing people and purpose over short-term gains, they stay at the top of their field. Maybe it's because of that.
Six years in, it's still the kind of partnership that motivates you to do better work. 🙌
