“I was supposed to be single forever”: Janni Delér goes off-piste as our digital cover star

Nestled in the nook of a snow-dusted Swedish stuga for her Vogue Scandinavia digital cover shoot, Delér is right at home. A fuzzy mass of knits, coats and accessories from Moncler, Yves Salmon, Goldbergh, Aim'n and Admundsen surround her as she gets glammed up for the shoot – looks that pay tribute to her love of the mountains, and the part they’ve played in her story. Her hair, styled in springy waves, nearly outshines the voluminous garments – a fresh twist on her classic hairstyle that later set her social channels alight.

The toasty lodge, with its old wood and Fraktur inscriptions, feels straight out of Dalarna, where Delér’s mum has a cabin. School holidays were spent on the classic Scandi pilgrimage in search of snowy peaks. So, when Delér met and hitched her wagon to free-style skier Jon Olsson in 2012 while in her early 20s, being together naturally meant touring the world together.

The pair first crossed paths at a dinner, where Olsson famously vied for the seat beside her. Before long, his mountain-bound nine-to-five became hers too. “I loved it! I tagged along to his slalom training and skied next to him,” she recalls. “He taught me how to carve. Before that, I just kind of slid around,” Delér laughs. It was love, not lust for the high life, that had her boarding different flights every week. “I never thought documenting that would lead to a job.”

Those snapshots from their international adventures – snowy slopes, sunny layovers, glimpses into their everyday life – began to take on a life of their own. “I remember thinking it was so cool the first time I was gifted an outfit. And when I started getting paid, it felt crazy!” she says. Delér became something of a blueprint for the modern creator in Scandinavia – and in a vast sea of online copycats, being an original anything is no small feat.



It’s a given today, but when she started sharing style tips on social media at 21, it wasn’t a career choice. Sweden’s first wave of bloggers – Elin Kling, Angelica Blick – had paved the way, but Delér, who now boasts 1.1 million followers on Instagram and 388,000 on YouTube, belonged to the next generation that turned the blog era into the vivid, fast-moving feed we scroll today.

Before anyone realised you could make money off Instagram, she was posting for a reason that feels foreign to most people now: for the hell of it. “We were just showing our lives, not curating for likes,” says the 35-year-old. “Today, so many people travel to post. But not back then. That lifestyle, being on the move 300 days a year – it didn’t exist.”

Delér’s posts made the planet look like a playground with the saturation maxed out, and she soon switched up from ‘happy-go-lucky girlfriend’ to online It-girl sitting front row at Fashion Week in Paris and New York. “Walking a [Rebecca Minkoff] show felt like pretend,” she says of her runway moment in 2017, recalling the thoughts running through her head: “When is someone going to realise this is a scam? What am I doing here?” She laughs at the memory. “I didn’t understand a thing, but I loved every second.” Then came the big-time brand deals, setting the mould for everyone now making a living off engagement.

You’d think, with her résumé, Delér would be haughty or closed off. But she’s Swedish Fish sweet. And surprisingly frank, given how brutal the online mob can be – especially after her split from Olsson three years ago. “I got a lot of shit for that. Every time I posted, the comment section was full of people saying that I’d ruined my family. They took a decision that we made together and dumped it on me. Jon and I were good. I mean, we still lived together!”

For a year after the split, they continued sharing a home in Cyprus. And when they first moved back to Stockholm, too. “When he started dating, though, it was time to move out,” Delér says. “It felt weird asking, ‘How was your date?’ and ‘How’s it going with that girl?’” Now they live a quick walk down the road from each other. She pops by in the afternoons when he has their kids, Leon and Leia, who are now six and four and a half.

The toughest part was the public response. “It left us wondering why those who’d supported us wanted to pick us apart. My insight was not to share publicly what hasn’t been processed privately yet,” she says. “My entire life had changed; I was already so down, which made me take it that much more personally. My profile went dark for months.”

The public smear has faded but not washed out. It took a full year before she went public with 38-year-old hockey hunk Dick Axelsson, a former professional player for the Djurgården IF team. Seated next to each other on Midsummer’s Eve in 2023 – the second seating plan that would change her life – they clicked instantly. Too quickly for Delér. “I was supposed to be single forever.”

“I had a hard time even imagining myself on a date,” she says. A walk and talk felt safe. “And after we started talking, we couldn’t stop. We texted and phoned constantly.” Before she knew it, they were an item. But privacy isn’t the only reason she keeps her blooming love life under wraps. “After being with Jon for 11 years – my whole adult life, I didn’t know who I was without a partner. I want people to follow me, not my relationship.”

The term ‘WAG’ does not apply to her. Delér might date athletes, but everyone knows that’s not where her credibility lies. She is a social media mogul whose influence turned into enterprise: transforming her reach into a holding company that last year secured over 50 million SEK in investment, and into two ventures that make her essence tangible and wearable – C’est Normal and Séduire, her clothing line and perfume brand.

Both are built to convey confidence: garments as a second skin, scents as an extension of self. Compliments, not corrections. Their distinct aesthetics capture the nuance of the founder herself. C’est Normal offers elevated loungewear and denim for men and women, while Séduire is a luxe, feminine repertoire of gourmand scents. The many sides of Delér.

“My nose is completely burned out,” she laughs, talking about Seduire, her olfactory creative outlet that launched in January of this year – starting with roll-on scents and now branching into atomised sprays. “You can see clothes. But a scent? You’re selling a feeling – and how do you convey that?” But the product speaks for itself. “We’d just finished making the first scent. I was in a cab to the airport, and the driver goes, ‘What perfume is that? I have to get it for my wife!’

She runs the label together with her sister, Michaela Byggmark Delér. “She’s my best friend. I know people say not to work with family, but I don’t see that. I’m close to them all; we’re a very tight-knit bunch.” Her parents set that tone early, despite splitting custody – a touchstone she now leans on to bring up Leon and Leia.

“They separated when I was a year and a half, but stayed really good friends, so there was never another way for me. Jon and I help each other, and our kids will always come first.” That unit’s grown beyond two, with her boyfriend and Olsson’s newly-minted wife both having children of their own. “They’re all the same age and they fight like siblings; they’re super comfortable with each other.”

It’s a delicate subject, but Delér says everyone asks how it felt when her ex got remarried – a three-day spectacle at a Disney-like French chateau this summer. “My first thought was ‘Oh, you already want to propose!’ But the second thought was ‘Go for it!’ Of course, at first, it was a little strange to think about him being married to someone else. But we’ve both truly moved on, and we’re genuinely friends. So I was just happy for him, for them. And she’s a really good mum. Their being happy is the best thing for all our kids.”

When I suggest that it all sounds quite harmonious, her reply is immediate: “I wouldn’t accept anything else.” That same serenity shines through on her vlogs. “What I love about YouTube is that it’s stripped back. Me on a typical Wednesday, making sausage stroganoff for the kids.” It’s a far cry from her nomadic ways a decade ago.

“I was kind of done with the jetting around. It was a lot of fun, but it got to the point where I barely remembered where I’d been. I wanted my kids to have stability.”

That sense of stability guides her in more ways than one – including how much of her children she chooses to share online. “It's tricky to decide how much to post about your kids,” she admits. “It's hard not to, because they’re the most precious thing you have. But I’m starting to move away from that, too. There are creepy people out there; it makes you ask yourself if it's worth it.”

Leon and Leia won’t have social media for a long time yet. “I’ll probably be one of those annoying parents in class saying, ‘We should wait – they can all get phones at the same time,’” she says. Of course, some days she’s tempted to hand them a screen for a few minutes of peace. “But I’m really against it.”

Delér knows better than most the double-edged nature of the digital world – the endless comparisons, the subtle rewiring of attention. “We still don’t really know what it does to the brain long term. But I feel it myself. I’ll be watching a series, drifting off, and suddenly I’m scrolling without even realising I picked up my phone. I’m like, ‘Wait, what am I doing?’”, she says. “It’s a constant pull, those little dopamine kicks.”

She’s grown up with that pull, just like her followers – watching the online space evolve from spontaneous to strategic, from a pastime to a profession. “If I could tell myself one thing when I started? Be a little prouder of your job,” she says. “Sometimes I’d be embarrassed to say I was a blogger, so I said I worked in marketing. It was kind of looked down on. Which has definitely changed – thank god.”

Looking back, Delér feels that she and her followers have “grown up together”. “What’s next for me is to grow up with my kids,” Delér says. “Being a mother is truly the most interesting thing in my life.” That, and seeing her brands grow. “One start-up, and all that comes with it,” she laughs. “One in a different phase. “It’s so fun to be along for the ride.”

They may come second to family, but she savours each role more for having the other. Fluent in the dance between public and personal has been Delér’s life’s work – culminating in this moment. “When I was younger, we’d joke about being in Vogue, probably because it seemed impossible,” she says. “Now I’m here and it feels amazing, almost a little hard to believe.”

At ease, Delér is a woman who’s found her rhythm. Not that she was ever out of pace. She captured the arc of her generation in real time. The same desires – tripping around the world, breaking into high fashion. And that timeline, relatable to so many: an adventurous youth, marriage, kids, heartbreak, letting love in again. That might just be why her fans stick around. Because at her core, despite a million followers, she’s not just an It girl – she’s every girl.