The whole history of Gekås in Ullared

– If you want a bit of curiosity, there are more people who visit Gekås in a year than those who visit the Colosseum in Rome.

Jan Melkersson, Falkenberg business manager, laughs over the phone. That Ullared would attract more visitors than the Italian tourist destination is not entirely true, but approximately 4.8 million customers visit department stores annually.

Melkersson tries to give context to the figure and, in a broader perspective, explain what Gekås has meant for the city of Ullared and the entire municipality of Falkenberg.

– It is a hub and an engine for us from the interior, which creates the conditions to maintain municipal service because they are located where they are located.

Gekås Ullared, he says, is the department store for “the common man”.

– The more important it is that money is sufficient, the more target group you are for Gekås.

Until the name itself, the department store is an apartment building. Göran (G) Karlsson (K) founded Firma Ge-Kås Manufaktur, in the basement of a villa in Ullared in 1963.

The first employee would be Göran Karlsson’s then love interest, who he liked at the local dance.

– Ullared had a party venue in the early 1960s that was popular with young people. There, Göran fell in love with a girl named Margareta Björklund and promised that she could get a job at the Ullared branch, says Thomas Karlsson, who in 2018 became the sole owner of Gekås Ullared, a DN.

He was one of the five Employees who bought Gekås from founder Göran Karlsson in 1991, and are said to know the history of department stores better than anyone.

– It actually happened that Göran opened in Ullared in a basement here. He managed to stay with Margareta and she became the first employee. So you could say it was double happiness.

At that time, mainly women’s cleaning coats and men’s car coats were sold. Even then, the focus was on low prices, although business didn’t pick up speed from the start.

– They sold well for around 60,000 the first year and there were some days when no customers came. But then it began to spread that gabardine pants and maid coats could be bought for less than 10 kroner per garment, says Thomas Karlsson.

Today, more than 50 years later, department stores are one of the largest destinations in Scandinavia.

How is it that you have been so successful?

According to Per Andersson, senior A retail analyst at Hui Research, has been helped by a steadily growing low price trend in Sweden, which began in the 1990s.

– It is a segment of commerce that has risen and fallen during different periods. But in the last four years, he’s had a really big focus, mostly through discount stores like Rusta, Dollarstore, Willys, Lidl, and ÖoB. Gekås concept arrives on time.

In addition, he says that Gekås has become a symbol of destination shopping, a customer experience that goes beyond pure consumption.

– It is an event to go to Gekås. Many people think that it is nice to go there and it is something they have worked with great determination. Today, Gekås is not just a business, but a destination.

Magdalena Petersson-Macintyre, Consumer Researcher at the Gothenburg School of Economics, agrees, but also emphasizes that a change in consumption pattern is an important part of Gekås’s success.

– Shopping has become a kind of recreation in recent decades, something we do when we are free. So it is clear that there are people who go to Gekås in order to actually get products at a lower price that they would not otherwise get. The combination of the fact that it is a kind of experience and that it is low prices means that more people can behave as our well-off behave, to choose freely from a large selection.

Although Gekås has long had bright prospects, it wasn’t until 2009, when the first reality show “Ullared” aired, that department stores became a phenomenon. The story of daily life in Gekås, with employees Morgan and Ola-Conny in the lead roles, was an immediate success and the series remains one of the most popular on Dplay.

And it’s clear what the department store is like they benefited from the success of the television series, says Falkenberg business manager Jan Melkersson. However, he doesn’t think the show reflects what it’s like to live and work in Ullared.

– It is the image that the channel wants to highlight, but that it is a fair image of the people who live in Ullared I cannot say. It is not a complete picture of what Ullared or the surrounding countryside is like. There are all kinds of people there and now we see that it is extremely attractive for Gothenburg scholars to move to these areas.

The design has also received criticism over the years. In connection with the premiere of the sixth season of “Ullared”, the series was described as “reality TV that runs with the working class”, by the professor of communication and media Göran Eriksson. He believed that the series could have been redesigned to portray the people who go to Gekås to make the economy go hand in hand.

– But nobody laughs at that. On the other hand, when you see a woman pushing three shopping carts full of unnecessary things that you think are fun to buy, you can laugh with a clear conscience. They become caricatures of the working class, said Göran Eriksson via the University of Örebro.

Gekås owner Thomas Karlsson emphasizes that This is a television program and it is obvious that the goal is to make it entertaining.

– You are clearly looking for great characters that are a bit out of the ordinary. But if you want to watch TV, you want entertainment. If we hadn’t produced these characters, it would have only been one season. Now more than 10 seasons have passed and that is a sign that they know it with television.

Gekås department store is heading for a profit of SEK 100 million in 2020, despite the effects of the corona pandemic. Millions of profits have become a standard for the company in recent years and this year it has a turnover of 5.5 billion SEK.

Experts are calling for an expansion, but stepping out of the Ullared suit would be a mistake, says outgoing CEO Boris Lennerhov. Today’s consumers, he says, have a completely different set of requirements than 30 years ago, and it’s just too difficult to maintain quality when it becomes a chain, he says.

– I imagine Haparanda because they have a fairly large area of ​​influence with Norway, Finland and Russia. So it could be exciting. But otherwise I can say that wherever we opened, we would cannibalize what we have.

Better than stick with UllaredHe says, find out where you are and refine what is already “good enough.”

– It’s like Liseberg, there must be new attractions all the time and that’s what we focus on. For H&M and Ikea, it may be a given to change all the time, but it’s not 5.5 billion units straight away. In my world, it’s not fun to bill eight billion and earn less. There are too many people who talk about rotation, it is not an art to create it.

At the end of the year, Boris Lennerhov resigned as CEO. When allowed to freely reason about consumption and responsibility for sustainability, it does so based on a strong conviction: people will consume regardless of whether Gekås exists or not.

– It is a bit tragic that so many people think that it is more fun to go to a shopping center than to go to the forest to pick chanterelles. But it is like this. As long as people have financially increased space and the opportunity to do more and buy more, they have.

– And that we must bear the weight of the consumer society … we are not the ones who consume, we only provide what people want to consume. I’m probably thinking from where I’m sitting that if things are going to sell now, it’s fun if we do.