Lovisa of Sweden

For everyone interested in the topic of ‘outdoor offices’ hearing the name Lovisa of Sweden rings a bell. We first saw the Bug (a piece of furniture “adapted to perform office work outdoors”) at the wonderful #OutdoorOfficeDay events in the gardens of the Frederiksdal Museum in Helsingborg. So who is Lovisa Pettersson and why ‘the Bug’?

Photo: Robert Johansson

I am 35 years old and live in Sweden with my husband and our 3 year old daughter. I have been running Lovisa of Sweden since 2018 and we are developing and producing innovations, especially related to the outdoor office solutions. We want people to experience this everyday luxury while making it easier to complete office work tasks outdoors. Working in nature should be comfortable and simple; besides, being outdoors with this purpose provides also a very special experience. But it is still something completely new on the market.

While working outdoors we experienced the very practical problem of the sun obstructing the view of the computer screen. We also realized that there were still no solutions for many other aspects needed when working in an outdoor office such as as ergonomics, environment, function, flexibility and sun protection. So we literally took old cardboard boxes and a pair of scissors and went out into a park to do samples and tests, trying to find the best solution to the problem of the sun and the computer screens. We first realized that you can't just put a box over the laptop, because the sunlight is reflected on your face and on your clothes and then it bounces into the computer screen. We would have never thought if it and discovered this issue if we hadn't actually tried it first. This was the first step in developing the Bug.

We get a lot of positive feedback. In fact, many people like that our furniture is so elaborate and well designed having all these crucial features needed to make outdoor office work possible and enjoyable. We are also often told that our chair The Bug is much nicer to sit in than people think in the first instance. This furniture actually works very well as an outdoor office :)

When it comes to the personal wishes Lovisa tells us: ‘the most important thing for me is that I have the opportunity to work outdoors whenever the weather is nice. Sometimes half an hour is enough, but sometimes I want to sit for hours outdoors. It doesn't matter really that much what I do outdoors; what really matters is that I can be and work outdoors. Way too many people here in the Western world spend most of their time indoors, even though humans are evolutionarily designed to live outdoors, and that is something we would like to change. Being outdoors is an effective way to recover from stress and anxiety-related illnesses can be effectively alleviated. Spending time surrounded by nature can also increase our quality of life and has a positive impact on our creativity and learning ability. 

Foto: Robert Johansson