Scan Magazine | Design | Joha
The baaa-st winter wear Freezing in the street, sweating on the tube; shivering when getting on your bike, steaming ten minutes later. Dressing for winter can be difficult, especially when you are constantly changing between the freezing cold outside and warm, humid indoor environments. But family-owned Danish underwear producer Joha offers an affordable, sustainable and comfortable solution. Wrap yourself and your little ones up in a 100 per cent natural, moisture-absorbing set of soft wool underwear that protects from both the cold and the heat. By Signe Hansen | Photos: Joha
Wool underwear might not sound like an area of great innovation. Still, Joha, Scandinavia’s largest producer of underwear for babies, children and youngsters, has many firsts under its belt. It was the first company in the world to manufacture machine washable wool clothes for babies, and the first baby underwear producer to be approved for the EU Ecolabel ‘flower’ label. Today, Joha also produces a large collection 12 | Issue 93 | October 2016
of female wool underwear and the Johansen series for men. Joha was founded by current CEO and administrative director Michael Frølund Johansen’s grandparents in 1963. Today the brand, which is headquartered in Sunds near Herning in Jutland, is sold in approximately 900 shops in the Nordic countries as well as Germany, Iceland, Belgium, Holland, Russia and,
more recently, Japan. The success can, says CEO Johansen, be attributed to the continued adherence to his grandfather’s meticulous and qualityorientated approach. “My granddad was a qualified tailor, and we have maintained his approach to tailored clothing up until today. We devote a great effort to ensuring that the things that leave our production unit are of a very high quality. When my granddad started the company, nothing left without having gone through his personal quality control. Today it’s on a different scale; it’s not possible for one man to quality control everything, but we still ensure that nothing leaves without having been through a rigorous quality check.” All Joha’s products, which include wool, cotton and silk underwear and nightwear,