LAKOR: from a lifestyle to a company

While most fashion brands are built by business strategists, LAKOR was built by artists, surfers, and free spirits who believe in doing things differently. In many ways, LAKOR’s story is the transformation of youthful idealism into the pragmatic idealism of a multinational company.

LIFESTYLE TO BUSINESS

“The concept of the company was born on a nightly drive from a surfing camp in Spain to the Swiss Alps in 2010,” explains Kasper Petersen, co-founder and managing partner of LAKOR. It started as a friendship among three students in Aarhus, Denmark, one of whom, Lasse Kornum, was passionate about drawing. During the drive, the friends decided to turn Lasse’s drawings and childhood dream into a shared vision – the foundation of a new clothing company that would reflect their shared lifestyle and values.

Today, LAKOR produces a variety of products, from t-shirts to coffee mugs. Their mission is to create a clothing brand that continually rethinks sustainability, designing items with both long-term use and end-of-life considerations in mind. One of their innovations is a system where customers receive a deposit for worn-out clothes when they return them to the store. For example, customers get around 4 euros for a pair of used pants, which LAKOR then reuses. Their commitment to sustainability goes beyond clothing. Since January 1, 2021, for every piece of clothing sold, LAKOR has donated an amount equal to the planting of a mangrove tree. So far, they’ve planted 390,787 trees.

GROWING FROM MISTAKES

Like most young companies, LAKOR’s growth was shaped by learning from mistakes – “'building the ship while sailing,” as Kasper puts it. “We poured all our capital into one collection without much knowledge of how to make products or how the market worked,” Kasper recalls. “At the same time, we were all juggling university with work. Eventually, we sat down and asked ourselves if we wanted to continue. Once we were all on board, we knew we had to approach things differently.”

Today, LAKOR sells roughly 100,000 shirts annually. As the company grew, they sought funding from EIFO – a fund supported by the EIF. “We wanted to explore what extra funding could do for our sales, catalogue, and brand recognition in new markets.”

“Building something from the ground up with people you like is one of the most rewarding aspects of our work... but it’s also definitely the most challenging!” Kasper jokes. “None of us knew where our nightly drive conversation back in 2010 would take us, but seeing people wearing our product has made all the hard work worth it.”

Location: Aarhus, Denmark
Financial Intermediary: EIFO
SME: LAKOR
Sector: textile
Number of employees: 20
Financing purpose: expansion
EIF financing: InvestEU