Our Sustainable Developmental Goals

Our wood is sawn at Møltrup farm, a home for formerly homeless men, who for some reason or another have run in to problems. At Møltrup, they are valued and respected as individuals, and their work at the saw mill allows them to experience being part of a committed working community again.

Our collaboration with Møltrup was established on the basis of a good neighbourly relationship and our common interest for working with wood. Our aim is to help people who need to experience being valued in their everyday life. Once they had developed the courage and desire to stand on their own two feet again, several of the men who have passed through Møltrup have since been employed by Thors Design.

We work actively to disconnect economic growth from environmental decline by upcycling obsolete quality materials in to unique furniture.

So far, we have upcycled 8 Danish harbours. It all started with wood from Korsør harbour. It required patience, determination and the right business model to utilise the discarded material, but the result made all the hard work worthwhile. We love our products, with all the distinctive and unique characteristics of that the weathered, robust, West African azobé wood allows.

We also work actively with other obsolete materials and hope to extend our product range further in the near future with products like outdoor chairs made from textile waste.

We are based in Timring, west of Herning in Jutland. Timring is a small well-functioning local community. The local people are active and sociable. But like all local communities, it requires a lot of effort to create activities and find places for people to gather and socialise. There is no longer a local shop or café where people meet and talk.

Thors Design is based in the old dairy buildings in the middle of the little town and is therefore a natural place for local people to meet up. Because of this, and because Carsten has a natural affection for the local area where he was born, the old dairy has been renovated in recent years and become the ideal place for a cultural centre for the town. After the renovations, we have arranged regular events, such as Danish pastry café once a month as well as larger events such as talks and classical concerts. The aim is that the old dairy can become an asset for the town and its inhabitants and ensure that people can meet.

We work with quality materials. Our materials are robust and long lasting, they can last for generations, whether they are inside or out.

We know that durability is one thing, it is another thing to persuade people to keep their furniture for a longer period of time. We have an ambition to move consumer mentality back to a place before IKEA, when they introduced cheap furniture. We want to go back to a time when we invested in furniture. We do this by being passionate about our pieces and taking our time to make each one. We make unique pieces, tailor-made for each individual customer. They are timeless designs, that remain appropriate regardless of changing trends. We believe that this approach ensures that our customers can love and enjoy our pieces both now and in 50 years’ time.

Our furniture is designed to have a long life. If at some time, our customer’s needs should change, we offer the possibility to modify our furniture and to adapt them to their new situation. In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and the change in peoples’ behaviour, we have visited an old hospitality customer and changed four Omega dining sets in a length of 3,6 metres, into 12 dining sets in a length of 1,2m.

In order to take responsibility for the earth’s limited resources, we have to ensure that circularity becomes a part of our business model. The resources need to become part of a circuit.

At Thors Design we do this by using reclaimed wood as our raw material in production. It has required a strong will and a great deal of patience to develop a method to upcycle the reclaimed harbour wood, along with a strong business model to make it a viable concern. We have succeeded and this is proof that it can pay to upcycle, even at a time when it would be cheaper to buy new materials instead.

We are also careful to consider the amount of waste material created in our production and how it can be used. A number of our designs have been developed entirely from the desire to use a certain kind of waste material that arises from the production of our primary products. Examples of this are our Elara bench, our raised beds and tealight holders.  We also ensure that the elements we build with are simple to disassemble to enable them to easily be included in a new cycle of use.

Another way that we take responsibility for our shared resources is by making everything to order. In this way, we only produce pieces that already have an intended use and value, we do not spend time and resources on something that can easily end up in a warehouse, and later in an incinerator.