What Did Denmark's HAY Do to Become the World's Fastest-Growing Design Brand?

There will always be a market for good design at a fair price.

The Danish furniture brand HAY has 289,000 followers on Instagram. That puts it squarely in the middle: MUJI has 107,000, and IKEA's most-followed account, its American one, has 515,000. You may not know the name, but its hexagonal metal trays, petal-shaped folders, fence-style benches and blue clocks with blank dials probably look a little familiar.

KALEIDO by Clara Von Zweigbergk

PLISSÉ by HAY

Bouroullec

Over the past year we have covered many of HAY's pop-up shops and new products. Like most Nordic home brands, it is simple and practical, but its bright colors make it lively, a long way from the "cold" Nordic style people usually picture. Walk into one of its stores and you will notice how many kinds of small accessories it sells.

Its prices sit in the middle, too. Take three examples from its Danish website: a plain soft-cover notebook costs 39 DKK, a wall clock designed by SHANE SCHNECK costs 599 DKK, and a small coffee table costs 1,099 DKK (about 37, 564 and 1,035 yuan). That is more than IKEA overall, but still a mass-market price. By Chinese standards it is not cheap, but it is not luxury either; it is close to what MUJI charges in China. And once you consider the designers behind the products, such as Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, Scholten & Baijings and Sebastian Wrong, who have all worked with HAY, the prices are easier to accept. Working with well-known designers and keeping prices within ordinary people's reach was the reason HAY was founded in the first place.

Soft-cover notebook by HAY

Wall clock by SHANE SCHNECK

Coffee table by Thomas Bentzen

HAY was founded in 2002 by three people: a young couple, Rolf & Mette Hay, and Troels Holch Povlsen. Povlsen founded Bestseller, the parent company of clothing brands such as Only, Jack & Jones and Vero Moda. He was struck by the inventive way Rolf Hay displayed furniture at a show in a parking lot, and went on to start the furniture brand with the couple. Povlsen was already 53 by then, and his son Anders Holch Povlsen had taken over Bestseller. He acted mostly as an adviser in the background and almost never took part in HAY's day-to-day running, but his experience and connections show in how fast HAY later grew abroad.

Rolf Hay actually trained in business, and worked in sales for long-established Danish furniture companies such as Paustian and Gubi. At Gubi he represented the high-end Italian design brand Cappellini, and he noticed that the people who truly appreciated Cappellini could not afford it, while the people who did buy it chose only traditional, conservative pieces. Those who could not afford luxury but wanted good design had to settle for IKEA: cheap, but without real style or good design. Rolf Hay and his wife Mette believed there was a gap between small-batch high-end furniture and the mass market. That gap was their reason for starting the company, and the market they cared about.

This matches the positioning of Bestseller's clothing brands. Only, Jack & Jones and Vero Moda all promise good quality at low prices and aim straight at young city dwellers who cannot afford expensive brands but still want a life of some quality. Seen in that light, HAY's furniture, with its playful shapes, bright colors and clever touches, is also made to young people's taste.

HAY does take accessories seriously. Its website splits products into two main categories, furniture and accessories & rugs. The first lists 66 items; the second lists 156 (the real numbers vary somewhat), spread across 10 subcategories including decoration, toys, office supplies, kitchenware, textiles and rugs. Mette Hay, who runs accessory design (Rolf runs furniture), told the core77 website in 2013: "Design is moving closer to these everyday objects. You can buy a good eraser, a pencil or a few sticky notes from us... These small things usually aren't well designed, and that's exactly what we want to do."

Its stationery goes down to fingertip-sized erasers, and the very idea of treating animal masks and playing cards as design objects is interesting. These are areas that mass-produced IKEA furniture and other design brands rarely take seriously. HAY also likes to rethink everyday objects we take for granted. On a toilet-roll holder, for example, it angled the spindle on its base so that it holds the roll in place and still looks good. Rolf sums up their style as sturdy, simple, joyful and practical. And young people who love accessories and new things never feel they have one pencil or one pair of scissors too many.

Marble eraser by HAY

Playing cards by Clara von Zweigbergk

porter by SHANE SCHNECK

Interestingly, neither Rolf nor Mette is a designer, and neither takes part in design, but both have long experience in the furniture trade. It is said that if you put any chair in front of Rolf Hay, he can tell you its name and its designer. Their role at HAY is more that of a bridge between designers and manufacturers. Mette Hay says designers sometimes have good ideas they cannot pitch to manufacturers because the ideas are too small. HAY is happy to make those ideas real, and the results feel fresh and unexpected.

Cappellini's habit of working with designers from all over the world shaped Rolf Hay's thinking. Once the company had grown a little, he began working with designers from outside Denmark, which was also HAY's way of escaping the label "Danish design."

Rolf Hay told QDaily by email that HAY has its own in-house design team and, beyond that, works with designers worldwide. Every collection on the website carries its designer's name; some are credited to "HAY," meaning the in-house team. The company stresses that its designers come from all over the world, not just Denmark, in the hope of making the brand more diverse and taking it into international markets. More than 24 designers or design duos now work with HAY.

In recent years, the international designers HAY works with have become ever bigger names.

Take the Dutch design duo Scholten & Baijings. After one conversation with them, the Hays agreed on two and a half months and 10 designs. Five were chosen for production: three rugs and two sets of glassware. One of them, a colored glass series, comes in 13 colors and sizes, some with a brass-colored dot in the base, others with a color gradient on the side. The glasses keep the lightness and clarity of glass while having a character of their own.

The bigger story was the collaboration in March 2013 with the French design duo Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec. The Bouroullec brothers are considered France's finest design team since Philippe Starck, and were in the top ten of Wallpaper*'s annual design Power List in both 2014 and 2015. HAY invited them to redesign the chairs for the humanities faculty of the University of Copenhagen. Made of oak and beech, the chairs stack neatly, parallel to the floor, and feel made for daily life. Inviting designers to furnish newly built schools is a Scandinavian tradition, and HAY used it to bring its designs into everyday life.

Working with famous designers brings a "star effect." Two months later, HAY showed the Bouroullec brothers' tables and chairs in Paris, then took them to Norway and other European cities, where they became a hot topic in interviews and the press. The collection also became a regular at design awards, helping HAY reach beyond the Nordic countries and win real recognition in southern Europe. In 2013 HAY was a frequent presence at design fairs in Britain and Italy, and by 2014 it was able to open a Mini Market in France.

Pieces signed by outside designers usually cost more than HAY's own, but stay within reach. HAY also sells a set of completely clear, ordinary glasses; the smallest costs 15 DKK, while the smallest in the Scholten & Baijings set costs 69 DKK. The designer's name adds value, and when the plain glasses and the colored ones sit side by side, you may well pay a little extra for the signed one.

Ordinary glasses by HAY

Colored glasses by Scholten & Baijings

Table and chair series designed by the Bouroullec brothers

HAY almost never misses a major international design week or home furnishings fair; its first collection was launched at the Cologne furniture fair in 2003. Perhaps inspired by these short, concentrated shows, it likes to open pop-up shops around the world, guerrilla-style temporary stores. It sets them up in landmark shopping malls in major cities to show and sell its products, does little advance publicity, and keeps them open for about a week.

In 2014 HAY launched the Mini Market concept. It is similar to a pop-up shop but usually stays longer. This August, a Mini Market at the SoHo branch of the Museum of Modern Art's design store in New York opened for four months, showing more than 230 products.

Showing furniture in random places around the world requires pieces that are flexible and easy to ship, and venues have their limits, so a Mini Market usually shows only accessories rather than the bulky tables and chairs of the traditional furniture trade. The concept was in fact Mette Hay's. A wide range of cleverly designed small things laid out in simple iron frames, in malls at the very center of a city, is clearly an efficient way to promote the brand. It sidesteps the furniture trade's seasonal highs and lows, and it tests the local market before HAY commits to a store. HAY's online shop carries almost all of its accessories and small furniture, so once a Mini Market has made the name known, customers can buy directly online, which widens its reach.

So far HAY has 8 stores in Denmark and 9 in other European cities. In Asia it has only one directly run store, on Taikang Road in Shanghai.

The Taikang Road store, near Tianzifang, opened in February 2014. Rolf Hay had already set up production in China, so many of the items in this store are made there. Since then, HAY has opened pop-up shops or Mini Markets in malls in Seoul, Busan, Tokyo, Singapore, Bangkok and elsewhere in Asia, but has not opened a store in any of them, although quite a few websites and boutiques sell its small accessories. Compared with MUJI's aggressive expansion in China, it is clearly far more cautious.

From October to December this year, HAY ran a Mini Market on the basement level of K11 in Shanghai. There are recent reports that it will open new stores in Beijing and Shanghai.

Mini Market

Mini Market online site

Shanghai Taikang Road store

In November 2012, the Danish Design Council gave the Hays its Annual Award, Denmark's most important design prize since 1980. The citation praised how quickly they had come to work with designers from around the world, whatever their nationality or background.

MUJI has always used Japanese designers. For HAY, working with designers from everywhere is a way of breaking out of "Danish design," but the Hays want to go further in aesthetics too. Rolf Hay believes that Danish design of the 1950s stood for lasting quality: "A chair can be used for many years without breaking, but the real question is whether you want to live with it for many years. We want design that is simple but not plain, special but not odd. We are looking for that aesthetic balance."

The sub-brand Wrong for HAY, founded in 2013, is an attempt to break away from "Danish design" altogether. It is run by the British designer Sebastian Wrong and based in London, far from the "Nordic style" and everything it brings to mind. Many of its designers are very young, and some have never worked with a factory. Rolf Hay sees choosing such a different place as a kind of balance in itself.

Sebastian Wrong is a partner in the British furniture brand Established & Sons and has experience in lighting design, an area HAY has long wanted to develop. In a 2013 interview with disegno.daily, he said HAY was growing astonishingly fast, and that he understood the "middle market" HAY was aiming at: "Many people think this middle market has disappeared, but I don't. It just needs to be redefined: good design at a fair price."

Wrong insists that Wrong for HAY and HAY are two completely different brands, and jokes that if a design is not right for HAY, it is a Wrong for HAY design. Still, the two brands share sales channels and appear side by side in stores and Mini Markets, and most of the time nobody can tell the difference. Wrong says this is only the beginning, and it will take time to build a real difference.

Images from HAY and taken on site