Hugo Lloyd Ulstein spent almost nineteen years at Stokke, the last three of them as Chief Commercial Officer, and used the time to become one of the sharper operators in premium consumer brand-building. He stepped into a role that didn’t exist, in a business whose iconic chair mattered in only a handful of markets, and helped turn it into a genuine global category leader, doubling it in size, walking away from major retail relationships before rebuilding them entirely on Stokke’s terms, and growing an acquired brand tenfold in value along the way. This is his account of how he got there: the calls he made, the mistakes he owned publicly, and the outside verdict that changed how he saw his own judgement.
About Hugo Lloyd Ulstein
Hugo Lloyd Ulstein joined Stokke, the Norwegian nursery and childcare brand behind the Tripp Trapp highchair, in January 2007, aged 27, into a role titled Global Sales Trainer that was, in practice, the company’s first global business development position, and went on to spend almost nineteen years at the company across eleven different positions.
He led the rebuild of the global sales organisation and distribution strategy, was central to the 2018–19 transformation that refocused the business around Tripp Trapp, and unified retail, e-commerce and marketplace channels under him as Senior Vice President and General Manager Commercial in 2020, before becoming Chief Commercial Officer in 2022.
He also served as chairman of the board of Jetkids and, later, of Evomove, the company behind the Nomi highchair, overseeing Jetkids through its COVID-era pivot and subsequent growth in value. Since leaving full-time operational life, Ulstein has focused on board and combined board-and-advisory roles across consumer businesses, including Peter Opsvik AS and bbhugme.
In Numbers
Stokke is privately held, and Ulstein is careful not to share figures beyond published records. But the results he does put on the record give a sense of the scale of what his leadership delivered:
→ The business more than doubled during his time leading the commercial transformation, the majority of it organic growth from the core, off the back of the 2018–19 refocus around Tripp Trapp.
→ Jetkids, the small suitcase brand acquired during his tenure, increased its enterprise value more than tenfold over the four years he chaired it, through a COVID-era pivot and beyond.
→ Babyzen, the French company behind the YOYO stroller, was acquired in 2021 as the outright market leader in the light-stroller segment, representing a huge deal in the juvenile industry that year, and YOYO has held a leading share in the category in several markets ever since.
→ His distribution clean-up saw thousands of underperforming doors closed globally, and major accounts walked away from entirely before being renegotiated on Stokke’s terms.
A Mandate to Change the World
When Hugo Lloyd Ulstein joined in 2007, the business barely resembled the global category leader it would become. It was, in his words, still fundamentally a furniture company, a large design-furniture line with a handful of kids’ products attached, one of them a chair called Tripp Trapp that held a meaningful position in only a handful of markets.
What the twenty-seven-year-old Ulstein walked into was a newly invented business development role and, in his words, a mandate “to change the world”, carte blanche from owners, a chief executive and a VP who believed the brand was capable of far more than it had yet achieved. But belief came with a catch.
“The people in the company had this fear of becoming too dependent on Tripp Trapp. Quotes like, ‘we can’t be a one-legged horse,’ meant we were going full throttle, but still with a bit of a handbrake on for Tripp Trapp, which we later changed.”
His first assignment was to find a foothold in South America. Three months later, he came back and told the business it was aiming at the wrong target.
“I felt it was going to be a much bigger ask, cost a lot more money and be much less effective than succeeding where we are. We were mainly a chair sold in furniture stores, not baby stores. We had a product that didn’t fit where the consumer wanted to buy it.”
That single course-correction – choosing penetration over expansion, three months into the job set the pattern for almost everything that followed: a leader willing to tell the business it was wrong before he had any track record to fall back on.
Clean Up Before Scale and the Power to Say No
The first fix wasn’t marketing or product. It was the sales organisation itself. Ulstein and his VP at the time spent years on the road, five days a week, rebuilding a commercial team from scratch, deliberately hiring almost no one from the Baby & Nursery industry.
It was the start of a hiring philosophy he still holds: bring in people who can grow with the company even as it changes shape, and treat every hire as a commitment on both sides. It showed in the results. His direct teams recorded the highest employee engagement scores in the company every year from 2016 to 2024.
“Hiring is a joint commitment between the company and the person. That’s also why letting someone go should be painful. The day it isn’t, something has gone wrong with you, not with them.”
What they found once they looked properly at distribution was a business with no consistent standards anywhere in the world.
“There was no real criteria in place that was implemented around the world. Even if the intention was there from headquarters, there was no transparency, it was like tens and tens of kingdoms around the world doing whatever they wanted.”
Ulstein pushed through a new CRM system and greater visibility into every market, but the harder work was commercial, not technical: he and his team discovered thousands of stores they shouldn’t have been in, and thousands more, where their actual consumers were shopping that they hadn’t reached at all.
The most painful decisions were with the retailers everyone else was proud to have on the account list.
“Where we struggled to be consistent most was with Harrods, John Lewis and others. We basically went out of almost everywhere. We terminated thousands of doors over a few years.“
He stayed out for years, cleaned up the wider distribution base, then went back to negotiate on Stokke’s terms rather than the retailer’s – Stokke’s own contracts, mandated in-store branding, both online and offline. Before one final, decisive meeting, his CEO called him with a simple instruction.
“If they don’t accept branding online and offline, you have my blessing to walk out of the room if you want.“
That backing, Ulstein says, is what let the standard hold. And it paid off for the retailers too: Harrods, John Lewis and others went on to become excellent partners for Stokke, precisely because the terms made them money. His summary of what “premium” actually means day to day has become close to a mantra since: not a price point, but hundreds of small decisions made every day, ideally by the people out in the market rather than the leadership team, including, regularly, the decision to say no to something that would make a salesperson’s month easier or their bonus bigger.
One retailer owner put it more bluntly, calling Ulstein after acquiring their biggest retail competitor in the market and as such getting transparency on how suppliers had acted towards the different retailers in the market: a pain in the backside, but an honest one.
Beyond One Chair, to Category Dominance
Tripp Trapp is the product Stokke is best known for, and it’s the one at the centre of the turnaround story that follows. But it’s worth being clear that the leadership case he built was never a one-product story, the doubling of the business ran alongside two acquisitions which drove the company into entirely new categories.
One was Babyzen and its YOYO light stroller, acquired specifically to buy into category leadership rather than build one from scratch.
“We realised we wanted a fast footprint in the light stroller segment. They were the market leader. We acquired them. They were direct in only very few markets, the rest were distributors. It gave us a lot of knowledge, because the Yoyo team had knowledge either we had lost, or that just came from the market developing.”
Ulstein describes YOYO as a different kind of challenge to Tripp Trapp, less about storytelling, more a product contest fought on weight, size and price. Acquired as the established No.1, YOYO has gone on to hold a leading position in the category in several markets since.
The other, Jetkids, was a far bigger leap of faith and, by Ulstein’s own admission, one he initially argued against.
“I was probably the most critical one in the entire leadership team back then. I said, look, wood is good, and now we want to sell plastic pull-along suitcases. It was a super small company, twelve people and a completely different segment than we’d ever been in before.”
Partly, Ulstein suspects, as a consequence of having been the loudest sceptic, the CEO later put him on Jetkids’ board in 2018 – and a year later made him its chairman. Not long after, COVID hit, a company whose core product was a suitcase designed for air travel, at the exact moment nobody was flying.
“The CEO of Jetkids came and presented to me. One proposal was to hibernate the company until people started flying again. The other was to do product development and try to be relevant to a different category. We decided, together with them, to do the latter.”
It’s a decision that only makes sense from someone leadership trusted to be honest, including about his own doubts. Jetkids added new award-winning products, moved its marketing beyond flying-specific occasions, and built momentum through the pandemic rather than waiting it out, proof, to Ulstein, that the same leadership model could work a long way from a wooden chair.
The Product Was Never the Problem
For most of Ulstein’s time in the role, the story he and the business told themselves about underperformance in the US and in China was consistent: they didn’t have the right product yet. Enormous energy went into finding “the next Tripp Trapp”, a search Ulstein admits he was fully part of.
In 2018, an outside firm, Bain, spent three months testing that belief against actual consumers, and dismantled it.
“They came back and said: look, the only one who doesn’t believe Tripp Trapp is the right chair for the US are the people in this room. The only one who doesn’t believe it’s right for China are the people in this room. We had the product, we just had to do it better.”
The response was structural, not cosmetic. Rather than spreading marketing spend a little across roughly twenty product lines, they concentrated the budget behind Tripp Trapp as the hero product – reassigning people from a long tail of smaller projects and onto the one thing the data said actually mattered. It cost headcount, a decision which made headlines he had to personally face, and only worked internally because he kept the rationale transparent from the outset. Growth followed almost immediately.
China needed a second, related correction. For years Stokke had followed the standard Western playbook there: parachuting in a Western expert to lead the market or the APAC region.
“You lose a little bit about who you are, and what really made the brand big in the first place. What we found is that when you hire high-level, highly skilled Chinese individuals, people educated and experienced with Western brands who then go back and see the China reality, they’re better than the outside expert saying, this is the best of what it is on the outside, now let’s implement it in China.”
It’s a hiring principle that has stayed with him since: bring in people who understand a market from the inside, rather than experts who arrive to explain it from the outside. Once Stokke backed local leadership to make that call for themselves, growth in China accelerated sharply. A parallel lesson landed in the US, where his own instinct to control every part of the chain – build it, run it, own it – gave way to a partnership that let him focus on what his organisation actually did well.
The Turning Point
Ask Ulstein to name the moment that changed the direction of his career, and he doesn’t point to a title, a market launch or the day the business doubled. He points to 2018 – the three months Bain spent taking apart a belief he had personally carried and defended for over a decade.
“That was a big moment for the whole company, and also for us personally. We learned so much.”
What makes it a genuine turning point rather than just a good consulting engagement is what Ulstein took from it about leadership itself: that conviction and self-confidence, especially once you’ve already had real success, can quietly calcify into blindness.
“There could be this self-confidence that creeps in that enables you to be a bit blind to the reasoning behind it. That is what we had in that 2018 moment with Bain.”
The lesson he draws from it is deliberately uncomfortable, because it cuts against the instinct of anyone who has built something: transformation must be driven from within, but the diagnosis often can’t be.
“Sometimes you need input from the outside – someone has to lift up the mirror. And that was the case for us, and it was the start of a huge growth journey. It’s one of the most difficult parts, because who proposes themselves to say, can we have an outside view on what we are doing here?”
It’s worth noticing that this wasn’t new behaviour for Ulstein in 2018, it was the same instinct that had made him walk into his manager’s office after three months on the job and say the South American expansion plan was wrong. The difference, in 2018, was the scale of what he and the leadership team had to be wrong about, and the size of the organisation watching them say it publicly. That combination, the willingness to seek out a verdict that might contradict everything you believe and the discipline to act on it once you have it, is what turned a strong operator into a leader who took a furniture company with one relevant product into a broader category leader.
Focus & Consistency
Asked what he’d tell a leader trying to build a premium global brand today, Ulstein doesn’t hesitate.
“Focus. Drive scale through complete product concepts, build around the core. Don’t try to sell too many product lines to every possible consumer. Find out what your most valuable asset is, and make sure the whole organisation puts enough effort behind it. Don’t be afraid of being dependent on it, that fear can really hold you back.”
The second piece, he says, is consistency, across every market and every geography, because it builds not just how consumers see a brand, but a culture where people understand the mission wherever they sit, whether that’s China, the US or Europe. Everything else, in Ulstein’s account of almost nineteen years and eleven roles at the same company, is detail underneath that.
In practice, he says, that means one brand standard held everywhere, delivered through a different channel architecture in every region: premium showrooms, Amazon and Stokke’s own e-commerce in America, live-streamed social commerce in China, selective retail in Europe.
“Where premium brands come unstuck is copying the channel model from one market to the next and hoping the standard survives the trip.”
That kind of consistency, he adds, has to be protected from the very top, and he is emphatic about who made it possible at Stokke.
“Great brands require visionary founders to build the soul and respectful custodians to expand it. Stokke had both: a founding family that created an uncompromising foundation, followed by Korean owners who brought genuine love for the products and the brand. Rather than financial engineering, they provided patient stewardship balanced with the highest possible ambitions, honouring its Scandinavian design philosophy and building global scale without ever diluting its identity.”
Where He Sits Now
Today, Ulstein’s focus is governance: pure board seats, or combined board and advisory roles, where he can have an active impact on the businesses he works with. It is a deliberate choice, and he draws the line precisely.
“I deliberately avoid pure advisory work, because advice without accountability dilutes impact. I want to sit where decisions are made, and live with the long-term outcomes.”
He doesn’t rule out taking the operational wheel again, but only for an exceptional opportunity, and only if two things align. The first is a genuine transformation mandate: a product with real design authorship worth defending rather than an incremental variant; owners, whether founders or private equity, who agree on what value creation looks like; and a true turnaround or scaling challenge rather than a business to keep warm. The second is skin in the game.
“I’d want the role built around business development and equity, as an owner-operator. Equity changes how you make the hard calls. You cut differently when it’s your own money.”
It is, in the end, the same discipline he applied to Tripp Trapp for almost two decades: know what you are, say no to what doesn’t fit, and commit completely to what does.