Christian was only 5 years old when he first saw a Norwegian stop-motion film (Pinchcliffe Grand Prix) about a bicycle repairman who builds his own racing car and wins the race despite the odds. The film made quite an impression, inspiring a young Christian to the perfect sports car. Some 17 years later, and against all odds, he did just that.

Christian von Koenigsegg was fascinated by machinery as a boy, dismantling video recorders or toasters to see how they worked and could be improved, even earning a reputation as the town’s best moped tuner as a teen.

At the age of 18, Christian began experimenting with technical innovations and had conceived some interesting inventions. One was called the Chip Player, where computer memory chips held an entire CD’s worth of data as a cheaper way to buy and store music. He conducted some patent searches for a musical device that would play chips instead of discs but with no interest. Christian moved on, not realizing that a few years later his idea would become the norm.

In 1991, he invented a new solution for joining floorboards without adhesive or nails, calling it Click, as the design enabled planks to simply click together. Christian presented this to his father-in-law in Belgium, who ran a flooring factory. He rejected it, claiming that someone would have invented it a long time ago if it were viable. Other floor manufacturers also dismissed it. In 1995, a Belgian and a Swedish company patented the same solution as Christian’s Click floor –even calling it Click! This innovation has turned into a multi-billion-dollar industry.