A success story from America – Creative Danish Entrepreneurship at work
The DABGO Connection
When we learned about DABGO we were truly excited and joined immediately to meet fellow Danes here in Southern California and all over the region. Now we have learned that DAGBO has more than 1300 North American members - so we thought we could share our story about entrepreneurship and success in the US which many of the members probably can relate to.
A little about us
The reason we moved to the US 6½ years ago, was that Lars was accepted into Harvard Business School in their full time MBA program. And after graduation we moved to Chicago where Lars was busy setting up a subsidiary of Gumlink and Helle was busy having and dealing with twin daughters. 2½ years later we were ready to start our own business and made the big move to California.
While in Boston and Chicago we had numerous times experienced that our American friends loved the Danish design we have in our home and a simple mission was born:
“Let’s bring some of that great Danish designs to the Americans”.
A little about our company
Creative Danes Inc. works as a distributor buying, importing and selling the unique Danish design products into the American market.
So far Creative Danes has partnered up with two Danish companies:
Schur Inventure A/S - www.schurinventure.com
Menu A/S - www.menu.as
We have been the exclusive importers of Menu® and DropStop® since January 1st 2007 where we started our entrepreneurial venture out of our garage in Encinitas CA (30 miles north of San Diego). And today, 20 months later, we are getting ready to move the business into a larger facility, get a warehouse and hire more people.
At the New York International Gift Show in February 2008 Menu® won the “Best Collection Award” out of 2700 exhibitors and that has attracted a lot of press and new clients. Our largest client, the Museum of Modern Art, has doubled the number of Menu items in their stores and the reference has brought us more museums stores and high-end design stores – so today we have about 150 retail stores all over the US.
Our products
The Menu product collection is great Danish design at its best – all items are truly unique, designed beautifully and at the same time cleverly functional.
The collection consists of products in the categories outdoors, dining, living and wellness - and last but not least our line of wine accessories, which is especially strong and carried by some of the largest wineries in Napa Valley. All together we currently carry about 200 items and about 30 new items is added every 6 months.
Please feel free to visit our web site at: www.creativedanes.com to see the full Menu collection.The future
The next growth step for Creative Danes is to offer our product assortment to hotels, restaurants and directly to businesses in the US. The direct sales effort to business here in the US will focus on customer and employee gift.
You are always welcome to contact us if you have any questions about our company, our entrepreneurial business model or our products.
All the best,
Helle Jensen & Lars Nielsen
www.creativedanes.com
info@creativedanes.com
Phone: 760 230 6010