The Rubik’s Cube is a global phenomenon. However, its inventor – the architect and civil engineer Ernö Rubik – wasn’t even thinking about the toys and games market when he developed the twisty puzzle to help students with their spatial thinking skills. The cube was therefore originally a teaching aid before becoming an extremely popular toy – not to mention an important source of inspiration for the Norwegian founders of AutoStore, Jakob Hatteland and Ingvar Hognaland.

In the 1970s, Jakob Hatteland started to buy and sell computer components as a way of financing his hobbies. He more or less taught himself everything a merchant has to know: how to get ahead of the competition and the best way to organize yourself and your merchandise. His workplace from the outset was a barn next to the Hatteland family home. With business beginning to flourish, Jakob needed more space. There wasn’t enough money for a new warehouse though. This meant better use had to be made of the available room in order to still react quickly and flexibly to customer requirements. And it was the Rubik’s Cube that provided the answer: Hatteland’s business partner Ingvar Hognaland devised a concept for a cube-based storage and retrieval system that can be adapted to the geometries at hand and reorganized at any time. AutoStore, as they named it, consists of storage bins that are stacked on top of each other in shafts, where they can be stored and removed again by robots in a flash. Gebrüder Weiss is now one of AutoStore’s 900-plus customers. Inbound, material flow and picking processes at the company’s Budapest site are largely automated – thanks to the excellent spatial thinking skills of Hatteland and Hognaland.