ICA turns 100 – online, on film and in jubilee magazines

This year, Swedish retail giant turns 100 years. We at the Centre for Business History help ICA celebrate this with four issues of the jubilee magazine ICAHUNDRED, with seven different historical films and by overhauling the historical website ica-historie.sen.  One history, many ways to tell it.

Update: Our magazine ICAHUNDRA #1 won the Swedish Design Awards 2017, category “B2B-paper”!  And our site ica-historien.se won the Swedish Publishing Prize 2017, category “Informationsite, professional and industyr”. Our ICA-film and our ICA-magazine were also nominated in two other categories of the Swedish Publishing Prize 2017.

It’s been a century since Hakon Swenson started a wholesale firm – that the clients, the shops it delivered to, were invited to buy a stake in. This idea is what ICA celebrates in all ICA stores in 2017, with the campaign “ICA 100 years – and forward”.  But they also wanted to remind all ICA store owners, who together hold the majority of the central ICA Group, of their joint century long history.  So ICA asked us at the Centre for Business History to find five dominant themes that ran through the 100 years, and to tell that story.

ICA has an inspiring history, that we wanted to tell in as many ways as possible, says Mia Ravnborg, project manager at ICA-handlarnas Förbund.

During 2017, we at the Centre for Business History therefore produce:

• Four issues of the jubilee magazine ICAHUNDRA, which is handed out to all ICA store owners and their staff, and to all ICA employees.
• A historical film about ICA’s 100 years in 10 minutes.
• Six historical short films, one for each ICA region.
• An update both in form and content of the historical website www.ica-historien.se

In addition, we will also, by assignment from the Hakon Swenson Foundation, hold four industry seminars during 2017.

Project group:

Project group at the Centre for Business History was:

• Concept and project management: Anders Sjöman
• Research: Anna Zeuthen
• Image editor: Margarita Feldman
• Content publishing: Mikaela Nordin
• Digital archive-management: Martin Månson

The project group sketched out ICA’s core story on a Historical Fact Sheet, with verified facts from ICA’s historical archive, which is kept and managed at the Centre for Business History since 2000.

For each product we then enlisted: