I learned to knit and sew when I was five and made my first clothes at the age of nine. My mother and my two grandmothers taught me. Growing up in Mora in the Dalarna province of central Sweden with these talented women and the strong tradition of handicrafts was wonderful. I was interested in clothes, but there was nothing much to buy locally so I made my own, and altered them, and sewed all the time.
I never thought I would be able to get a job working with clothes. Instead my aim was to get a job with a lot of time off so that I could sew in my spare time. But then I went to the Swedish School of Textiles in Borås and Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm. My degree collection at Beckmans became the first nygårdsanna collection.
That was in 1994, and since then things have blossomed.