Ylva Lundberg: See You Later, Alligator!

Hey y'all, over there! Three weeks ago I left Malmo, Sweden and my job at Homeenter, the Nordic countries' largest Film, Music and Children's Film Club. In Malmo, I mainly work with the development and planning of our Collectables Series and with printed media such as direct mail, inserts, ads and other print activities.

So my new life takes place here in sunny Florida in the city of Orlando! First of all, I can't explain how much I appreciate the warm weather here, I worship the sun and all the vitamins it gives me. Other things I appreciate is that it takes me 1 minute to go to work, all the amazing concerts here (Bruce Springsteen was awesome). I can go to the beach and enjoy the ocean or to the lake and practise some paddle surf and hunt alligators (this weekend I found my first one!) and least but not last I get to hang out with some crazy Americans!!! 

When I don't do all of that I work for the consumer marketing department at Bonnier Corporation and during my first weeks I got to know my nice and welcoming colleagues and got introduced to the almost 50 special interest magazines Bonnier have here in the US. Right now, there is a lot of planning going on for all the direct mail that will be mailed during December and January. We are now having a lot of meetings discussing all the different tests of the past direct mails and what should be tested this time; premiums, price, layout etc. For me all this is very interesting because that's more or less what I do back home, so hopefully I can share some successful ideas or vice versa.

I have spent a lot of time in the States, so I'm more or less used to that everything here is big and all of that, but when it comes to certain matters I still get reminded that not everything is the same as back home. One example is the washing machine I use here in Orlando. It has some different settings, and while I prefer my laundry clean I choose the longest and most powerful program. In Sweden, that would last way over an hour but here it takes only 14 minutes! At first I thought that it is very environmental friendly with just 14 minutes, but after some scanning of my clothes I'm afraid I will walk around with some stains on my clothes during my stay here. So I hope my colleagues can oversee that or I'll have to go to the mall and buy new clothes every time I eat spaghetti bolognese.

That's all for now folks, it's time for some steak!