Dansk & Quistgaard Designs

Dansk Designs was established in the 1950s by an American who toured Europe seeking out talented designers to produce a range of homewares he could sell to the US market. His idea was to utilise designers experience in traditional crafts to produce designs that could be mass produced making them accessible to 'ordinary' American households. 

The first European designer he recruited was Danish silversmith Jens Harald Quistgaard. Quistgaard's preferred material was iron and he used this material in many of his earliest designs for Dansk in the 1950s.

From the 1950s to the 1970s Quistgaard also designed homewares for Dansk using teak, enamel, glass and steel. During this period Dansk manufactured products in the country it considered excelled at production of a particular material. Enamel products were made in Denmark or France, glass in Sweden or Finland, teak and steel in Denmark etc.

However from the 1980s production moved away from Europe to more cost-effective regions and the golden era of Dansk was over.