The Swedish capital of Stockholm is perfectly poised to be outward-looking. It helps that the place is teeming with entrepreneurs and creatives who have found the city to be a welcoming and nurturing host, particularly during the gruelling dark months of winter where hibernation is eschewed in favour of buckling down and getting to work. It may surprise you to know that it’s the birthplace of Spotify, Skype, Klarna and Minecraft and that this graduating class of wildly successful start-ups has earned it a reputation as Europe’s unicorn factory. Stockholm is a great place to be if you have ideas.

As the sea glittered with the last drops of summer sun, we caught up with the ideas men who have defined Stockholm in 2019 and asked them where they’re planning to take it in the future.

Best friends Messrs Andreas Palm and Christian Larson are the duo behind the underwear brand CDLP. Masterminding undergarments that somehow manage to be both sophisticated, sexy and sustainable (seriously, you have to try a pair), they are changing the way men think about their smalls.

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Where did you meet?

Mr Larson:  At Stockholm School of Economics. I was a drop-out because my interest was all in film and photography and I’d just got a job with a Swedish film director [Mr Jonas Åkerlund]. Andreas and I found each other because we were both restless individuals, but it was school that brought us together.

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What do you mean by restless?

Mr Palm:  I think being in Stockholm can make you restless because it’s such a small city. It’s really nice to be here, but if you’re a bit restless, you want to go out and see the world and work outside this small bubble that we’re in. So, Christian did film and I had a business where I did brand experiences abroad for Swedish companies such as Spotify and Klarna. We were both on the road a lot and we always met up, and we used to share hotel rooms, so naturally we started to see each other in our underwear.

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And you realised it left something to be desired?

Mr Larson:  It was ugly underwear. You know, like massive logo types. There was that whole era of funky things happening on your underwear. People didn’t really think about it, and it just kept going on from what people wore in their high-school years.

Mr Palm:  Underwear was the only product category where there hadn’t been any innovation in the past 20 years, so we looked at each other and we started to think, well, are there any options?

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Who do you have in mind when you design your underwear?

Mr Larson:  We like to say we design it for the best version of ourselves. We’re not always the best version of ourselves, of course, but when we are, that’s who we try to design for: a modern, conscious man who’s not defined by his sexuality. Someone who cares about sustainability and how things are made and someone who cares about how he looks.

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Mr Valdemar Fredriksson is perhaps the platonic ideal of a Swedish personal trainer. Tall and handsome in a kind of calm, Stone Island-clad, Viking way, he splits his time between Stockholm and the Hollywood Hills, where he promotes his personal brand of “functional fitness”. A physical polymath, Mr Fredriksson has tried everything from pole dancing to Pilates and specialises in Brazilian jiujitsu. He’s a force to be reckoned with.

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How did you get started as a personal trainer?

It’s not about training as such for me. It’s more about addressing a lifestyle. I quit drinking 11 years ago, when I was 18, but I didn’t want to be the person who wasn’t going out. I’m more relaxed now, I travel, I party, I do everything, but I do it sober. Training was like my new habit. I realised I could get those endorphins I got from partying from the gym instead.

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What are the biggest differences between Stockholm and Los Angeles?

In Sweden, fitness training is something we’re raised with, but in LA, it’s more about many types of people coming together who end up in a community where fitness is a huge thing. It’s more superficial in LA, and its OK to say that and be proud. I love that.

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What do you wish more people knew about personal training?

It’s as much about mental health as functional movement. I look at it as three blocks: you have nutrition and eating, training and moving, and the mindset. Even if you look good, it doesn’t mean you’re healthy. It’s about combining these three things into making your lifestyle better.

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Was there a lightbulb moment when you realised this was what you wanted to do?

I needed to find a passion. In their teenage years, everyone explores what they want to do. I started jogging, flirted with training, but it wasn’t really my cup of tea. Now I train in basically everything you can think of. I’m always curious. And you always learn something, even if you really suck at it.

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What do you really suck at?

Pilates. Really badly. That’s big in LA, so it’ll be only me and 20 Russian models on the Reformer and it’s killing me. I also tried pole dancing. Let’s just say the word “sexiness” didn’t really apply to my performance.

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Raised in the creative Södermalm district of Stockholm, Mr Kristoffer Fagerström has lived all over the world, but always finds his way back to the city. A product designer and partner at the illustrious design studio Note, Mr Fagerström is helping to shape what Scandinavian design means in 2019.

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What keeps you in Stockholm?

Stockholm, and Sweden in general, is a great place to be at a creative entrepreneur. The city is geographically small, but it compensates by being very open minded and with the sense of anything is possible if you work for it. However, the number-one reason for staying now, I guess, is that I have two young daughters and I can’t think of anywhere else in the world I would rather raise them.

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Tell us about Note.

The Note that has become a well-known name in the fields of design and architecture was founded about 10 years ago by a group of people who shared the same ideals and passion. Now it’s a multidisciplinary creative studio that works with interiors, product design, graphic design and design strategies for companies all over the world. We put a lot of emphasis on our flat hierarchy where everyone’s voice at the studio is equally important. When we look for new talent, we look for interesting personalities with a strong expression rather than perfect portfolios and we like that the team now consists of creative personalities from different backgrounds and social contexts.

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What’s the most exciting thing you’ve worked on?

My part in Note is heading the product design projects and our projects normally span at least a year or two, so the most exciting project is still secret, I’m afraid. This is quite a problem because once we’re supposed to talk about it, it’s already old news to us. However, I can mention we have recently started a project with a client from Seoul, South Korea, and it gives me goose bumps, in a good way.

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What makes Swedish taste and design special?

There is an expression in Sweden, “jante”, and it basically means you shouldn’t stand out from the crowd and don’t pretend to something you are not. Do your work well and with enthusiasm, but whatever you do, don't brag about it.

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Mr Fabian Bolin was diagnosed with leukaemia in July 2015 when he was just 28 and was told he had a 60 per cent chance of survival and 900 days (yes, that’s a real number) of chemotherapy in front of him. After starting a blog to document his journey, he enlisted the help of his close friend Mr Sebastian Hermelin and the duo created an app, War On Cancer. It’s a storytelling platform designed to bring cancer patients together and enable them to share data during their fight against the disease. It is a resource for both patients who may feel isolated and for research organisations who would like to utilise patient-reported data to create a positive impact. The duo’s presence is growing rapidly. They have already done about 100 speaking engagements across Europe and the US. Through War On Cancer, they want to change the way people approach living with cancer and give patients and survivors the tools to heal through authentic connection.

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How did you start War On Cancer?

Mr Bolin:  When I was diagnosed, I immediately had a lot of questions for the healthcare professionals. What does life look like with cancer? Can I work? Am I going to be hospitalised or am I going to be at home? What should I eat? How should I exercise? I got really vague answers, such as, “Eat whatever makes you happy,” which frankly felt belittling. I took to social media, shared a post on Facebook and asked people to help me find someone in a similar situation. This post was shared almost 13,000 times in 24 hours and the seed for War On Cancer, without me knowing it at the time, was sown there.

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You speak a lot about how War On Cancer is not just for patients, but for their friends and loved ones, too.

Mr Bolin:  I think about my mother and her mental journey. It’s evident now that I’m through it, but if I mention that I’m feeling ill or getting a cold, I can tell that she immediately starts to recall when I had cancer. It’s not just people who have cancer who are affected by it.

Mr Hermelin:  When we started War On Cancer, we spoke about my experience from reading Fabian’s blog, which led me to realise the only thing I can do to be a supportive friend is to understand what’s he going through. Most patient groups or apps are built for a specific group of people and a specific diagnosis group, but we wanted to build a place that welcomed everyone – patients, loved ones and survivors.

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What impact do you think the app has beyond connecting people affected by cancer?

Mr Bolin:  We started to get in touch with the large research organisations in healthcare and they said to us, “Do you realise what you’re about to build and do you understand the potential?” We realised that, as well as the mental health aspect, if we managed to unite people affected by cancer on one platform, we’d also have an opportunity to become a provider of patient-reported data.

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What does getting that data from patients look like?

Mr Bolin:  We’re all about transparency, trust and integrity. Rather than just nicking data from users without their conscious consent, we’re building a separate feature and that’s going to be surveys that have been selected specifically for you. You can choose if you want to engage in that data sharing, but research shows that 95 per cent of patients want to donate their data because if you understand you are helping others, it can be a way for you to heal mentally. It comes back to that idea of altruistic happiness.

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What’s the best thing about doing all of this?

Mr Hermelin:  We know what we’re doing has an impact and working towards a goal like that gives your life and your work tremendous value. The biggest highlight is finding meaning in life and realising a little bit more what life is about. I thought the purpose of life was having money. This has made me realise that money will never make me happy, but helping other people will.

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Mr Moley Talhaoui was born in Sweden to Moroccan parents and, through a cultural duality and a deep sense of self, paints his feelings. His neo-expressivist canvases depict chaotic scenes of darkness cut through with splashes of colour, cartoonish skeletons and visceral images of the human body. If you were to attempt to pigeonhole Mr Talhaoui’s work, you might say it lies somewhere between Mr Jean-Michel Basquiat and Mr Hieronymous Bosch by way of Funnybones. “I started drawing when I was young,” he says. “I suppose every child is into drawing or painting before reading and writing. I guess I just kept on doing it and haven’t fully stopped.”

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What’s Stockholm like as a place to grow up?

My upbringing was one foot on Swedish soil and one hand on my Moroccan roots. I guess the in-between became the neutral ground from where people of similar experiences like me connected. This theme or narrative is a typical prologue for many new Europeans around the union.

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How long does it take you to create a piece?

It depends on technique. Sometimes I wrestle with a piece and it feels almost like I’m working with clay rather than colours because I’ll be into something, but it’s not quite it, so I have to let it dry and go back to it. Before I had my son, I used to paint every day for a few hours, so it felt like I did one piece a week. Now it’s more like one big piece in a month, but I’ll go to work on it four or five times, so it gives me more time to think about it.

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How do you see a project through to the end?

My process is mainly intuitive in the beginning, floating in the middle and close to its end, organised and a bit thoughtful.

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How does your Moroccan heritage inform your work?

I’ve been thinking of the relationship between an artist and their heritage and have come to the conclusion that maybe heritage isn’t written or told by the ones alive now, but instead is kept alive by the ones coming on after. It’s maybe up to the future generation to pick and examine my work. The variables in between what I am and where I’ll end up will maybe tell the story of what I brought with me from my parents’ past into my now.

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