"When I go into a boardroom, a room full of suits, I never wear a suit": CEO Pernilla Nyrensten is kicking down doors in sky high heels

I am sitting opposite one of the most formidable women in Sweden and she has tears in her eyes. “I have an older brother and my father thought that he should have been the one to help with his business, but actually it was me. So it was a huge moment in so many ways, a ‘prove them wrong’ moment.”

Pernilla Nyrensten, the founder of RevolutionRace, is describing the exact moment she rang the bell at The Stockholm Stock Exchange back in September 2021, making her the first ever female CEO to do so since its inception 160 years ago. “That got a lot of attention, for sure,” she says. She apologises for getting emotional now, looking back. “The moment when I rang that bell, I cried after because I was so happy.” It was a major coup, even in Sweden, one of the most progressive countries in the world when it comes to women’s rights.

As expected from someone running a multimillion dollar business, our in-person meeting had to be rescheduled twice before eventually landing on a Zoom call. Nyrensten is recovering from a cold, but appears as far from ill as one possibly can, dressed in a moss green silk shirt, her gold nail polish glistening through the screen. Van Cleef & Arpel earrings peek through her gleaming blonde mane. Though I can only see her from the waist up, I am willing to bet that she’s wearing heels.

“The customer comes first” isn’t just some jargon plastered on a corkboard near the watercoolers of Nyrensten’s Stockholm-based company – she lives and breathes the adage. RevolutionRace, which offers attractive, affordable and functional hiking and outdoor gear, was started with the customer in mind. The company's first product, its trademark hiking trousers, were born through customer feedback. “The customers have been a big part of our brand-building,” Nyrensten explains.

Nyrensten was at a tradeshow with her husband, Niklas Nyrensten, helping her father with his clothing business. She had been involved with her father’s work in one way or another since the age of eight – she credits him for her entrepreneurial spirit. At the fair, Nyrensten spotted a woman in her mid-twenties wearing a less-than-ideal pair of work trousers. “They were outdoor trousers in green, and they were quite big. I asked her what she thought about her pants, and she told me, ‘I think they are way too expensive,’” she recalls.

The woman confessed to Nyrensten that she had spent so much money on her hiking trousers – about 200 euro – that she would rather wear her own jeans to pick blueberries than risk staining these ones. There were no affordable alternatives on the market. “That got me thinking, ‘Yeah, she's right,’” says Nyrensten, noting that if you opt for cheaper brands, the quality suffers. “I was very, very excited and I told [my husband] Niklas about creating a happy outdoor brand with a lot of colours, direct to the consumer, so we would be able to give them better quality... At half the price.”

As a nature lover herself, Nyrensten has experienced more than her fair share of the great outdoors, including hiking in Venezuela, Ecuador, and even reaching base camp at Everest. She realised there must be other women who, like herself, wanted well-fitting hiking clothes at affordable prices, in more attractive colourways. She approached several retailers with the idea, but was met with resistance. “They told me, ‘Pernilla, the outdoor industry is way too conservative and all of those colours... What are you thinking? Do you know how hard it is to build a brand from scratch when no one knows who you are? No, we don't like the idea.’ So that was a failure.”

The initial rejection didn’t stop her. With the support of her husband, she got back to work. Using the 30,000 euros they initially saved to renovate their kitchen, the husband-wife duo started a company instead. “It was the kitchen money that made us start RevolutionRace,” Nyrensten jokes. The year was 2014, and the kitchen would have to wait. “Niklas built our homepage from scratch. We did everything by ourselves,” Nyrensten says. “So I was a model, I did all the marketing, I packed all the packages.”

They began by selling on social media, communicating with their customers directly. They only had enough cash to start with a single product: trousers. They launched in pink, black and rusty orange, based on the feedback from customers on Facebook. “It was my idea that I wanted to involve the customers – I was obsessed with customers,” she says, noting that the larger brands failed to communicate directly with their audience. As it turns out, the customers wanted pink hiking pants, the exact idea that had been shut down by the larger brands months before.

This kind of direct marketing seems obvious to us now, but back in 2014 it was revolutionary. “I almost couldn't believe that we actually were the first in the outdoor industry that built our brand on social platforms. I talked to Facebook and they told me we were probably the first,” she says, proudly. In 2015, a video of Nyrensten explaining the various functions of her trousers posted to the brand’s Facebook page went viral. Her Facebook ads manager had advised her against it, say ing the video, which was filmed on an iPhone, was “too boring” and should be glossy and exciting “like a Red Bull video.” Nyrensten posted it anyway and it wound up being one of the best performing ads on Facebook that week.

The video caught the attention of Facebook’s HQ in San Francisco, where they used it as a case study. ‘Real life hacks’ videos were internally touted as ‘best practice’ from then on. The Facebook ads manager called back three days after the video went live to apologise. Though she and Niklas started RevolutionRace together, it was never a question that Nyrensten would be in charge of the business as CEO. “It was clear from day one, but we didn't talk about it, obviously... I'm very analytical and business-minded and chasing every single krona,” she says. It was Nyrensten who came up with the brand’s name and its catchy tagline, “Nature is a playground.”

Nyrensten had a humble upbringing, in the small town of Borås, in the southwest of Sweden, in a neighbourhood she describes as “not the fanciest”. Her parents divorced when she was two and, although she remained close with her father, she lived with her mother. “She worked as a nurse at a hospital, so we didn't have that much money,” she says. “I couldn't go on vacation like many other kids in my class could. So, good upbringing, but still with not that much money.”

In Sweden, where the public school system allows for much more social integration than in other parts of the world, it was difficult for a young Nyrestren to compete with her wealthier peers. “The school I went to actually had a lot of richer kids in the same class,” she recalls. “So I wanted to show them that even if I couldn't afford all the stuff that they had, I was capable of doing well.”

Nyrensten was tenacious, even back then. She tells me she once lost a chess match at school and, in a real life Queen’s Gambit moment, decided to master the game. “You know how I did it? I studied by playing against myself. I studied the whole weekend because I got so angry that I lost,” she recalls. Two weeks later, she sought her redemption in a match against kids two years her senior. “I ended up in the finals.” Nyrensten was seven years old at the time. She never went to university, opting instead to teach herself.

Sweden is a country teeming with entrepreneurs. Many of the tech world’s unicorns (privately held startup companies with billion dollar valuations) have originated here – Spotify, Klarna and Skype to name just a few. RevolutionRace sits comfortably in their class; after completing the aforementioned initial public offering on the Nasdaq in Stockholm at a valuation of 8.47 billion SEK, it tipped the scales at just over 1 billion USD. “In Sweden, entrepreneurs are almost like rock stars,” Nyrensten says. “I met a girl when I won an award at the digital influencer awards, she told me I was her biggest idol and I was like, ‘What, are you kidding me’.”

Perhaps it’s the competitiveness of the industry, but entrepreneurs aren’t forthcoming regarding who inspires them, often citing their own grit and determination as the only tools they needed to get by. Nyrensten is unabashedly candid about who she looks up to. Richard Branson, for one, because he “does good and is good,” and one other person: “Kim Kardashian,” Nyrensten says. “She is amazing when it comes to the Skims brand and I like the way she has used her celebrity as a platform and endorses women to be and feel great about themselves.”

Like Kardashian, Nyrensten is a businesswoman who has unabashedly invested in her personal appearance and received flack for it along the way. “I get a lot of criticism because it's seen as almost a bit too vain. Many talk about that – ‘You like to do your makeup. You like to look attractive’,” she says. When she has a big meeting, she regularly opts for dresses, heels, and “full glam,” which seems atypical for the founder of a hiking brand, not to mention a high-powered CEO. “When I'm out in the woods, it’s RevolutionRace 100 per cent, but when I go into a boardroom, a room full of suits, I never wear a suit because then I want to be the power woman. You need that mentally. You need to feel confident in a room full of 20 men.”

For Nyrensten, giving back is important. With the little time she has left over from running her business, she is passionate about helping other women achieve success at every age. “You know what, sometimes people say, ‘Do you want to help young entrepreneurs?’ And I correct them. I say, ‘What do you mean? I want to help women entrepreneurs, but they don't need to be young, because look at me. I actually was 40 years old when we started,” she says.

So what does a successful entrepreneur, who can now afford practically anything she wants, spend her money on? “Bags and shoes, I have a lot of Chanel and a lot of Louboutins,” Nyrensten says. She enthusiastically shows me her latest purchase: a pair of eye-wateringly high black suede platform Louboutins, studded in centimetre-long spikes. Perfect, as she says, for kicking down doors: “Sometimes, mentally, I think, ‘What if I kick down the door with my high heels and enter the room and say, hello?’”