A Family Company: Five Generations of Working for Gunnebo
Clockwise from left: Oskar, Ivar, Bo, Fredrik and Tyra Stalebrant
History follows company’s progress from metal-bashing to high tech
Last summer, Tyra Stalebrant, aged 19, became the fifth generation of Stalebrants to work for Gunnebo, in a Swedish family story that dates back to before World War I.
Oskar, Tyra’s great great grandfather, joined Gunnebo around 1910 and stayed with the company all his life. His son Ivar started with the company aged of 13 (school was just for six years) and worked there until he retired at 65.
Back then, Gunnebo was a metal-working company well-known in Sweden for making nails and chains. The company took its name from the village of Gunnebo in south-east Sweden, where in 1764 it started out by making hammers.
Ivar Stalebrant was still alive when Fredrik, his great grandson and Tyra’s father, started with Gunnebo in 2011. By then, Gunnebo had become a multinational security company. In between, Fredrik’s father Bo worked for some years at Gunnebo, in a workshop making tools for the manufacturing process.
The family’s history spans the development of Sweden from a mainly agricultural country to a modern, high-tech industrial nation – rather like Gunnebo’s progress from making hammers to sophisticated technology connected digitally in the cloud.
“We Stalebrants have been a Gunnebo-dedicated family for more than a century,” says Fredrik. “We didn’t plan it, it is something of a coincidence, but it makes me feel proud to be part of Gunnebo for so long. It is intriguing to think what my great grandfather Oskar would have thought if he had known that five generations would go on to work here.”