In December 2014 Christian and Jasper made some special Christmas gifts: beautiful leather tote bags from the leather leftovers.
“But we are not going to put this into production. The focus is still on furniture for now – even though we consider ourselves a brand, and not ‘just’ a furniture company. In the future we will consider making some custom made limited products from the leftover material from our production. But for now the furniture has our full attention.”
On October 30th Christian and Jasper were invited to a very neat event – the World Interiors News Award Show in Saatchi Gallery in London. And as it turns out – the guys won for best furniture.
”We are thrilled that the jury sees the quality of our furniture. We’ve always believed that we were on the right track, but as our furniture in many ways is a niche product, we didn’t expect to be among the winners in this contest – especially not considering the 60 very much qualified contestants from 20 countries and with grand players like Moroso, Artek and Ligne Roset among them.”
Well-deserved and pretty awesome!
Christian and I grew up together. Well, that might be a bit of an exaggeration. But we went to school together and lived in the same area.
When this whole thing started – and by ’this whole thing’ I mean the idea of me blogging about Overgaard & Dyrman and how you build up a brand – I visited Christian in a town nearby our hometown. Far away from where I live now.
It was in the industrial neighborhood of a small town with around 3000 people. I had borrowed my parents’ car and turned down a narrow street trying to spot a house number somewhere.
Finally I found my way around the back of a huge hall. Or machine house. Or workshop. Anyway, it was huge with a lot of machinery and work stations for people working with metal. I’m not sure. I think they were making springs or screws or whatever kind of metal widgets.
The owner, an old friend from when Christian was a blacksmith apprentice, had offered to let Christian use one of their work stations in the hall.
”Nobody really understood what I was doing there, but at least I didn’t get electrified like in the hen house,” he told me.
And in general I think Christian was just grateful that he could borrow this for free, even though it wasn’t forever.
He talked me through the whole process. Showed me the iron moulds. Told me how they tried having the chairs produced in India. How nobody could do the leather work they wanted. How they had foam delivered from one place in Denmark, thread from another, furniture leather from one place and full-grain leather from another. How they created their own photo studio, when they couldn’t afford to hire one. How expensive the small metal widgets at the bottom of the chair were and that they were made by a guy we once went to school with. And how this was really their dream.
And on the parking lot his Berlingo was parked. The seats in the back were removed, and the car was now loaded with four Wire-chairs.
”A lady in Copenhagen bought them,” Christian said with a smile.
September 11th 2014
6.50 this morning we finally got the delivery of 300 cardboard boxes. At that point you actually remember that they take up quite a lot of space. Actually they filled up an entire room that we had other plans with. Anyway – they are looking good with the logo and everything. And now we’re ready to ship abroad!
Quite a few of the stories of Overgaard & Dyrman ends with ”…and then, ultimately, we just had to do it ourselves.” This has been their way out. Or their way forward if you like. Every time something wasn’t as good as they hoped it would be, every time something was too expensive, every time something wasn’t possible, Christian and Jasper took it upon themselves to do it on their own. Make it possible.
Starting this company as young designers and not being willing to compromise with jobs on the side, you have to find some other ways out. When Overgaard & Dyrman needed a website for their universe, they made it themselves. It was the cheapest solution and also the only way to ensure that it was going to be exactly the way they wanted it to be. And it’s indisputable – they are quite particular about every little detail concerning their brand, business and product. Maybe an important factor in the story of success?
The same happened when they need commercial shots of their products. A photographer can be a costly affair when you have leather worth of $10.000 and metal components worth of $10.000 lying around and you don’t actually have an income. So what did the boys do? They bought a camera and a big tripod-light and covered the old dairy in white linen and with a little Photoshop magic, they had their pack shots and a new set of skills.
Generally this is what happens all the time. If the finest upholsterers in the country say they can’t do it, Christian and Jasper do it themselves. If they don’t think the lacquering or the tanning is good enough, they start wondering if they could do it themselves. And that’s how everything becomes exactly like they want it to be.
The pictures above are not from the dairy, but from a small castle in Norther Zealand, where the guys got the chance to shoot some pictures.
At one point, around the last part of 2012, Christian was doing his blacksmith work in his sister’s henhouse. Surrounded by chicken crap and bad lighting and with no heat and no useful tools or machinery he was shaping the skeleton of the Wire Collection – the iron frame.
But it wasn’t easy.
”I kept getting zapped by electricity,” Christian tells me.
And now it gets a bit complicated for a writer girl like me. But the thing is that when you are welding, you need to have electricity going through whatever you’re welding. You need a ground cable connected to your subject, so that you’re creating a closed electric circuit. Usually you’d put the ground cable on the table, which is normally made of steel. And then that’s all you have to do.
But Christian was working at a wooden garden table, and since wood does not conduct electricity, he had to connect the ground cable to the subject every time he wanted to work.
“When you try to weld without the ground cable, you can get a small schock from the initial spark. That’s not too bad, but still makes you kind of nervous, when you tried it enough times. However, what you really don’t want to do is touch the ground cable. Then you get around 100 ampere through your body and it’s not really a lot of fun anymore.”
Jasper, on the other hand, was not bothered by fast electricity. Quite the opposite you could say. Jasper was at home in his two-bedroom apartment. From here he was experimenting with a beautiful, but very old Singer sewing machine – a secondhand buy from some relatives of a deceased stranger. It was also at this time that Jasper managed to sew the first full-grain leather upholstery for the Wire chair.
”It took a few days,” he says smiling.
The story of the two entrepreneurs truly had its bohemian ”you-gotta-crawl-before-you-walk” moments. But there is nothing sentimental about it for Jasper and Christian. Those were the circumstances, the actual options, if they wanted to pursue their dream. Even if a henhouse and an old sewing machine were to get them there.
