He says his ideas never run dry, so he turned things like the “unmanned coffee cart” into a business

His latest: testing an unmanned vending vehicle in Hefei.

On the evening of June 13, a strange bus that had turned up on the campus of Hefei University drew plenty of attention.

It stood on the lawn in front of the school's main gate: transparent on three sides, about 10 meters long and 4.1 meters tall. On the roof sat a neon "24 hours store" sign, solar panels and surveillance cameras. The back of the bus held a video wall for playing ads, and between the entrance and the exit at the front stood a vending machine.

At seven that evening, with staff from the bus's maker, Wheelys, on hand to explain it, the vehicle — named Moby Mart and billed as an unmanned, self-driving store — took in its first customers.

Before you board, you need to download the Wheelys 247 iOS app. Scan the QR code on the bus and the door opens by itself. Inside there is no checkout counter and no staff, just a full row of goods facing the door, plus a microwave and a refrigerator. Scan the QR code on an item with the app and you see it drop into your cart; tap to pay with the mobile payment method linked to your Wheelys account, and the self-service shopping trip is done.

Per Cromwell designed the bus, and he co-founded Wheelys. He, Tomas Mazatti and Maria De La Croix started the company in 2014, and on the strength of a "mobile coffee cart" it reached more than 70 country and regional markets in a little over two years. Moby Mart is now the company's most important new project, one it has been preparing for months.

A week before the June 13 event, Moby Mart was assembled at Wheelys's factory in Tongxiang, Zhejiang, then hauled to Hefei on a special truck. Per and his team came down from Shanghai for the final adjustments.

The design had been settled after months of discussion, but Per kept finding more problems as he tuned it. He suddenly wasn't happy with the shape of the vehicle, and he worried about everything that could go wrong on the night — the battery dying, the lights inside not being bright enough...

Per's fussiness left the launch date up in the air. Only four days before the event did Wheelys's marketing staff tell reporters exactly when and where it would happen.

The work paid off quickly. That same evening, Designboom carried the news that Wheelys had launched Moby Mart. Over the next few days the story spread fast, turning up in Wired, Fast Company, TNW and other tech, business and lifestyle outlets.

"I think retail as a format is bound to change within ten years, maybe sooner," Per told QDaily. "The idea of an unmanned vending bus came from wanting to create a more flexible shopping experience. That's a good thing both for people who want to start something of their own and for ordinary consumers."

Per Cromwell, a Swede, is 45 this year. Wheelys, which claims it will remake retail, is his fifth venture.

He has loved design since childhood, when he liked building things out of sticks and stones. After university he joined an ad agency called T5 and spent nine years there as a creative director. Becoming a designer, for Per, was the obvious thing to do.

"I can't imagine what a world would look like where you're not creating something," says Per, a designer who cannot sit still for a moment. He has too many odd ideas in his head and too little time, and that makes him uneasy. He jumps from one idea to the next, and calls that "resting."

"I remember one day my son told me, smiling, that he liked playing with me on the beach — we'd build scenes and houses out of driftwood or shells and play for hours. That's relaxing for me. But doing nothing... that stresses me out," Per told QDaily.

Per's life as an entrepreneur really began in 2003, when he and his cousin Tomas founded the creative consultancy Studio Total in Stockholm. One took creative work, the other business consulting, and they served brand clients.

But unlike an ordinary creative studio, Studio Total also did plenty of things that had nothing to do with business — some of them well "out of line." The wildest was the 2012 "Minsk teddy bear air raid."

On July 4, 2012, Per, Tomas and another Studio Total employee, Hannah Frey, flew a small single-engine plane out of an airport in Lithuania. They entered Belarusian airspace, circled unchallenged for nearly an hour and a half, dropped 876 teddy bears over Minsk carrying banners calling for freedom of speech, and flew home without trouble.

The stunt set off a diplomatic row between Belarus and Sweden, and put Studio Total, which had planned it, at the center of the storm.

Three weeks passed before the three of them were identified. By Per's account, they simply wanted to show support for Belarus's opposition and embarrass President Lukashenko. He had gone to Minsk in advance to rent a house and a car, planning to pick up his two accomplices after the plane made its forced landing and take them to an embassy for refuge.

Preparations for the "teddy bear air raid" started a year ahead, including $184,500 spent on a plane and a year of flight training. Tomas only got his pilot's license a few weeks before they set off — and up they went anyway, unafraid.

Per tires of things as they are. Going after the next surprise is the secret of what keeps him making things.

"Honestly, I can't judge some of the things I've done," he says. He has tinkered with plenty of odd gadgets that can't really be called a business: a magnetic flying carpet for dogs; No More Woof, a device that translates what a dog is thinking; a huge sound system built from 28 speakers. These concept products are experiments as much as anything. They bring the company no real return, and he enjoys making them all the same.

In 2013, The Nordic Society for Invention and Discovery (NSID), which grew out of Studio Total, was formally set up. Its slogan changed from serving brands to something more direct: a "Scandinavian innovation lab." Tomas and Per founded NSID too, and Maria, now Wheelys's CEO, was one of its employees.

No More Woof is NSID's signature product. It grew out of a question of Per's: might there be a way to turn animal language into something a human can understand?

There is, for instance, a particular signal in the brain that marks tiredness (I'm tired!). "I'm hungry," "I'm curious who I am," "I'm thirsty" — these are among the neural patterns easiest to spot. Animals may not think the way people do, but their brain signals still leave a lot to work with in experiments that try to read animal thought.

No More Woof is a kit for translating a dog's brainwaves, made up of an EEG sensor, a tiny computer and special BCI software. You fit it on the dog's head; it picks up the brainwaves, turns them into human language and speaks them through a loudspeaker. The basic version costs just $65 and can translate two or three different canine thoughts; a $300 version can tell apart at least four patterns of thought.

"I can't say exactly where my inspiration and creativity come from, because they're always there," says Per, whose ideas seem never to run dry. He can find them in any corner, especially the corners other people don't look into. He prefers his own garden to design magazines, museums and exhibitions, because he thinks mass media tends to breed identical, boring ideas, and he would rather follow plain curiosity.

Having so many ideas, Per has also brought his taste for experiment to the brands he works for. He once built a Micasa Lab for the German home-furnishings brand Micasa, and came up with plenty of fresh, odd home-design concepts there.

At Micasa Lab, for example, he made a smart cloud that forecasts the weather, Nebula 12. The indoor cloud used liquid nitrogen mixed with hot water to make billowing vapor, which a vacuum drew in and circulated around a light fixture. Over Wi-Fi it connected to a Nokia Lumia 920 and pulled the forecast off the phone by itself. In standard mode it showed the next 48 hours of weather: gray when overcast; a red glow through the cloud for low pressure; on a clear day the cloud vanished and only yellow was left, turning a warm orange at sunset. It told you the weather to come, and it never rained.

Users could even set Nebula 12's colors themselves to get the mood at home right. Heard today, this concept product from 2012 sounds a lot like the smart home lighting that has caught on lately.

Counting The Tale Studio, the multinational creative agency Per later co-founded, and T-Shirt Store, the clothing brand he began with, he has helped start five small companies over the past dozen-odd years.

If you read Per's five ventures as one long adventure, he sat through the long, steady early stretch at Studio Total before he grasped where his passion lay. Beginning with the "teddy bear air raid," his wild, eccentric ideas slowly got built. Even when neither profit nor fame came of it, Per came to understand that any piece of work always takes more out of you than you expect. "It can eat up every one of your evenings and weekends. So if you don't start out with real love for it, the process will be unusually hard."

Per's enthusiasm rubs off on the people around him, and it is with their support that his ideas finally stopped being flights of fancy.

Maria De La Croix, 27, is a friend who worked with Per and Tomas at NSID. She may not have as many ideas as Per, but she gets things done.

In 2014, after Maria was turned down for a job at Starbucks because she had dyed her hair blue, she got the idea of selling coffee herself. Per and Tomas decided to help her do it, and added a twist of their own: sell the coffee off a bicycle.

The three of them agreed on the spot and set up the coffee-cart company Wheelys in Sweden. The division of labor was clear. Maria, as CEO, ran the day-to-day work of everything in the company. Per took design — the brand identity, the building of the carts. Tomas, the most business-minded of the three, handled long-term strategy, and traveled to coffee-growing regions around the world himself to pick good beans for Wheelys.

The Wheelys cart, sold on freedom and green credentials, carries a gas stove, a sink, a generator, a refrigerator and a microphone, and runs entirely on solar panels and pedal power. In 2014 the first version went up on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo, open to buyers anywhere. For $2,990 you could reserve a cart. Once it arrived you joined Wheelys's "franchise" and ran a Wheelys pour-over coffee business, or bought organic ingredients that met its standards and sold those instead. Wheelys encouraged operators to pick their own customers: turn the cart into a newsstand if you like. You kept most of the revenue but paid Wheelys a percentage as a management fee.

The cheap, flexible, unconstrained model helped Wheelys Cafe pull in a crowd of follow-on investors after it got into Y Combinator, the famous Silicon Valley incubator that hatched Airbnb among others. One of them is Morning Crest Capital, the major shareholder behind both Wheelys and its Chinese operator, Weilesi Food Technology.

Plenty of money let Wheelys expand fast, and left it more room to move in a market as complicated and as large as China.

So far, Wheelys Cafe has rolled into more than 70 country markets, and the cart itself has gone through five versions. Early this year, chasing cheaper costs and a bigger market, Wheelys moved its headquarters from Sweden to Shanghai, where it took a small office on Hengfeng Road with a dozen or so employees, registered under the Chinese name Weilishi Machinery Trading. Half of every month, the three founders — Per, Tomas and Maria — fly to Shanghai to work alongside the staff.

Wheelys now runs the entire overseas coffee-cart market by franchise, and handles upgrades to the cart itself. Weilesi bought out the operating rights for China, aiming at office towers, shopping malls and similar spaces, and runs Wheelys carts through a mix of direct operation and partners. It has built a team of more than 50, over 20 of them on backend development, updating the software the cart uses on the merchant, supply-chain and consumer sides and adding features such as ordering ahead through WeChat to make it smarter.

Beyond that, Moby Mart is the project the whole Wheelys team cares about most right now. In Per's vision, Moby Mart will change how people shop the way the mobile coffee cart did. In 2015, when they came across Näraffär, an unmanned convenience store in a Swedish town of fewer than 5,000 people, they saw the opening at once and bought the small company, which ran that single store. Wheelys took Näraffär's unmanned retail system, folded in the "mobile" idea it knows best, and Moby Mart was born.

Policy still keeps Moby Mart off the road, and self-driving technology isn't truly mature either, so it needs more development and testing at Hefei University. For now it runs as a university student startup project, testing unattended operation and automatic restocking.

Per and his team think Moby Mart has a good run ahead of it. In time it will not only drive itself; it will also follow the Wheelys Cafe model, welcoming any buyer to join and customize an unmanned store of their own. Mobility and an open community are, in Per's words, what set Moby Mart apart from the unmanned stores run by retail giants like Amazon and Walmart.

Next, Wheelys plans to set up a separate company for Moby Mart, the better to attract investment and carry on the development work.

"If you hadn't founded Wheelys, hadn't made the coffee carts and the unmanned bus, what would you be doing instead?"

"I'd create something no one has done yet, since there's so much worth doing. The only thing I worry about now is that my time is limited. If I could realize 10 percent of my ideas in my lifetime, I'd already count myself very lucky," Per Cromwell said.

Unless otherwise noted, images in this article come from wheelys.