They seemed to be characters straight out of a Shakespeare play. Cristina Stenbeck, the eldest child, who assumed her father’s mantle as head of both the family and the business empire and became one of Europe’s most powerful businesswomen. Hugo Stenbeck, the wayward son who made headlines for bar brawls and drunk driving. Sophie Stenbeck, the more sensitive ­sister who was involved in charity work and was referred to as “the family’s Mother Teresa.” Max Stenbeck, his father’s favourite child, the charming little brother who was predicted to take over the family business one day but who instead died at the age of 30. And then there was Felix Granander, the “unknown son,” whose existence his half-siblings knew nothing about until their father’s death.

Like all genres, Swedish podcasts and radio documentaries have certain methods and conventions. They revisit a historical news event, portray a person as either eccentric or as someone who met a tragic fate, or they sniff out some kind of mystery. A lot of documentaries look like that. What appealed to me with this idea was that it had the potential to be something different; a cross between a business story and a family saga. More like a TV drama, where the audience follows a given cast of characters over time.

Well, there’s no denying the ­insatiable curiosity about the rich and powerful.

Of course, other journalists had tried to portray the Stenbeck siblings, but they had done so from the outside and from a distance. If we were going to do it, we would do it from the inside.

Jan and I had a meeting with the production company Banda and agreed on a plan: if we could get one of the Stenbeck siblings to participate, we would make a documentary series together. If we managed to get two of them to do interviews, the series had the potential to be really good. We began by ­approaching Sophie Stenbeck because she seemed to be the sibling that would most likely consider the proposition. In her youth, she was known for shying away from the spotlight, but in recent years she had done a couple of interviews. Maybe she had changed her view of the media? It was worth investigating.

Agreed to an interview

So one morning in March 2022, Jan and I drove to Sophie’s ­equestrian centre in Wellington, Florida. She had agreed to give us three whole days of interview time. But we were ­nervous; we had no idea whether she would actually tell us anything of substance or just answer our questions ­politely, ­superficially and evasively like a media­-trained person of power.

As it turned out, Sophie Stenback was more than ready to talk. She spoke with astonishing candour about everything from the power struggles within the family empire to the deaths of her father and brother. When Jan and I drove away from the equestrian centre after conducting the first day of interviews, we were so excited that we screamed out loud.

The work continued after the Florida trip. Jan approached more people for potential interviews and I began ­editing the material recorded on our trip. Everything felt good, we were just about home and dry – or so we thought. In actual fact, we had a long and strenuous process ahead of us. For one thing, we had made some mistakes. One ­example among many is when Jan interviewed Lars Johan Jarnheimer, spokesperson for Ikea’s holding company and an extremely busy man. When the one-and-a-half-hour interview ended, Jan glanced at the audio recorder and ­realised he had forgotten to turn it on. He was forced to grovel until Jarnheimer finally agreed to do the whole thing over again from scratch.

A crucial participant

But what concerned us most was the time it took for the other three siblings to reply. Although Cristina Stenbeck said no to taking part almost immediately, we still held out hope that Hugo Stenbeck would agree, but his spokesperson finally informed us that he declined. The fact that Felix Granander, “the unknown son,” hadn’t replied at all made the situation even more stressful.

Hugo and Cristina had always been close to Sophie, and in our interviews, she had also talked a lot about their life experiences. But Felix had grown up far away on the other side of the Atlantic and had led a turbulent life. Only he could tell his story.

Finally, after many months of waiting, Felix informed us that he would participate. He gave us three long interviews in which he talked open-heartedly about his drug abuse problem and the grief he felt for the father he never got to know. He also revealed that he didn’t know, and hadn’t even met, his half-­siblings Cristina and Hugo.

Back to the drawing board

Jan and I then wrote and edited this into a documentary series in six episodes, telling a story that played out over two decades, from Jan Stenbeck’s sudden death in 2002 to his daughter Cristina’s abdication as head of the business empire in the early 2020s. We played the episodes for Lovisa Lamm Nordenskiöld and her colleague Hugo Lavett in Banda, thinking that the ­series was more or less completed. But they didn’t agree; we had told the story in the wrong sequence, they didn’t sympa­thise with the siblings when they listened to them, and they found it difficult to follow when the life stories of the father and the five children were presented simultaneously. We had to go back to the drawing board.

After a long delay, the ­series, called Dynastin (The Dynasty), was finally released in January 2023. For us at Svenska Dagbladet, the publication also proved to be a real experiment. Previously we had released our bigger podcast projects free of charge on all the regular platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcaster and Podme. People with experience from the podcast industry had told us that it was hard to charge for podcasts and that audien­ces are rarely prepared to use podcast apps other than the ones they use for their regular podcasts.

But this time we decided to take a chance. We decided to publish the first two episodes on all platforms but to make the four remaining episodes available only on Svenska Dagbladet’s own site and to paying subscribers. We had no idea whether it would work; we were running the risk that people might be content with hearing the two free episodes. But if that happened, we always had the option of releasing the rest of the series free of charge later.

Most successful publication

As it turned out, we had worried in vain; at the time of writing, Dynastin has drawn over 600,000 listeners. Every fourth person who heard the two free episodes chose to go to SvD.se to continue listening. In fact, the number of subscriptions sold beat Svenska Dagbladet’s previous record by a huge margin. The series has attracted attention in lots of TV and radio programmes, podcasts and newspapers. In terms of both conversion and reach, it’s SvD’s most successful publication to date.

When you write a text like this one, you’re expected to offer some kind of recipe for success, some explanation of why it went so ­exceptionally well. So what do I think? Well, there’s no denying the insatiable curiosity about the rich and powerful.

Because Sophie Stenbeck and Felix Granander decided to speak out, we could give a unique insight into a ­family which previously had kept a very low profile. But I don’t think that ­insight would have had the same ­impact if it had not been presented with sound narrative craftsmanship, without a script that was honed time and time again and without Jan Almgren’s skilful investi­gation into the family’s business ­empire. Also, without Jan’s experience and reputation capital, many key figures would never have taken part and ­spoken as candidly as they did.

For me, as a podcast creator, the project sparked a desire to dare to experiment even more with methods and genres. It was a reminder that you shouldn’t have too much respect for the “truths” you hear from experts. And not least, Dynastin has proved that these types of ambitious documen­tary projects are not just journalistically relevant and good for a brand; in the best-case scenario, they can also be good business.