one of the richest men in Norway, Ringnes is well known as a flamboyant businessman and art collector whose family started the country’s largest brewery more than a hundred years ago. In his hometown of Oslo, Ringnes owns several restaurants and museums and has donated more than $70 million for the creation of a large sculpture and cultural park, which opened in 2013.
In his heart, Ringnes is a collector. Over decades he has built one of the largest private collections of art in the world. Yet his real legacy may come from something far more unique: his lifelong obsession with collecting mini liquor bottles.
This fixation began for Ringnes at the age of seven when he received an unusual present from his father: a half-empty mini liquor bottle. It was this afterthought of a gift that led him on a path toward amassing what is recognized today as the largest independent mini-bottle collection in the world, with more than 52,000 miniature liquor bottles.
Unfortunately, his decades-long obsession eventually ran into an insurmountable opponent—his late wife, Denise.
As the now legendary story goes, Denise wasn’t too pleased with the disorganization of having all these bottles around the house. After years of frustration, she offered him an ultimatum: either find something to do with all those bottles or start selling them.
Like any avid collector, Ringnes couldn’t bear the thought of selling them, so he created a solution based on his wealth and personality.
He commissioned a museum.1
“To Collect Is Human”
Today his Mini Bottle Gallery, located in downtown Oslo, is one of the world’s top unique museum destinations, routinely featured in irreverent travel guides and global lists of must-see Scandinavian tourist attractions. Beyond providing a place for Ringnes to store his collection, the gallery, which has a restaurant, is also a popular venue for private events.
It was here, while in Oslo for a conference dinner that included a tour of the Mini Bottle Gallery, that I got my first personal introduction to Ringnes and his story.
I have 52,500 different miniature bottles in a museum in Oslo. They’re completely useless. But men, we like collecting. We like having things. That’s human. Once you get fascinated by something, you want it and then you start collecting.
Christian Ringnes, Founder, The Mini Bottle Gallery
The museum lived up to its quirky reputation.
The entrance is a bottle-shaped hallway leading into an open lobby with a champagne waterfall. As you move through over 50 unique installations spanning three floors, each features its own composed soundtrack, customized lighting, and even some unique smells. Like all great museum experiences, the rooms of the Mini Bottle Gallery are carefully curated.
The mini bottles are grouped into themes ranging from a brothel-inspired Room of Sin with mini bottles from De Wallen (Amsterdam’s red-light district), to a Horror Room featuring liquor bottles with trapped objects such as mice and worms floating inside.
There’s a Jungle Room, a Room of Famous Persons, and rooms themed around sports, fruits, birds, circus performers, and the occult. There’s even a room featuring the iconic porcelain series of the Delft Blue KLM houses, a series of tiny Dutch rowhouse-shaped liquor bottles given away to passengers by KLM Airlines for more than five decades.
Across all these rooms, the tour mentions that the gallery typically has more than 12,000 bottles on display. Apart from the scope of the themed rooms, one of the most interesting elements of this story is what the gallery does with the bottles that aren’t on display.
An Accidental Trend Curator
Like any other museum, the Mini Bottle Gallery never uses its entire collection. Instead, they only display about 20% of Ringnes’s full collection at any time, and carefully keep the rest in storage. This thoughtful curation adds value to the experience of seeing them.
Curation is the ultimate method of transforming noise into meaning.
If you consider the amount of media any of us is exposed to on an average day, the quest to find meaning among the noise is a challenge we all know personally. Navigating information overload requires the same discipline as deciding what bottles to put on display so those that visitors see can tell a better story.
Without curation, themes would be indecipherable and the experience would be overwhelming, downright noisy.
It was only on my flight home from Oslo after that event that I realized how important curation had become for my own work.
Just a few months earlier I’d published the first edition of my Non-Obvious Trend Report, inspired by an idea to publish an article from the many ideas I’d collected over the past year but had never written about. What I was already doing without realizing it was collecting intriguing ideas and saving them in perhaps the most disorganized way possible—by writing them down randomly, printing them or ripping them out of magazines, and then stashing everything in a well-worn folder on my desk.
In producing that first report, my ambition had been to describe patterns in the stories I had collected that went beyond the typical obvious observations I was always reading online. My goal was to find and develop insights that others either hadn’t yet noticed and that were not getting the attention they warranted.
To get a different output, sometimes you need a different input.
On that flight home from Norway, I realized that my accidental method for getting different input—collecting ideas for a year and waiting months before analyzing them—could be the very thing that would set my insights apart and make them truly non-obvious.
The Non-Obvious Trend Report (my annual list of fifteen trends) was born from this desire to collect underappreciated ideas and connect them into predictions about the future.
The Underappreciated Side of Data
Now, if you happen to be an analytical person, this process will hardly seem rigorous enough to be believable. How can collecting ideas and waiting possibly be a recipe for developing genuine insights? What about first-hand research, surveys, and focus groups? What about trend panels and using a global army of trend spotters? What about the data?
While it’s easy to assume that data means putting numbers into a spreadsheet or referencing some piece of analytics published in a journal—the truth is that data has a forgotten side that has little to do with devising experiments and far more to do with training your powers of observation.
When you think about the discipline that goes into scientific research to produce raw data, research can seem like a task only performed by robot-like perfectionists. The truth of scientific research, just like the truth behind many equally complex areas of study, is that experiments aren’t the only way to gather data—nor might they even be the most accurate.
Trends, like science, aren’t always perfectly measured phenomena that fit neatly into a spreadsheet without bias. Discovering trends takes a willingness to combine curiosity with observation and add insight to create valuable ideas that you can then test to ensure they are valid.
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