Our story
A workshop before it was a shop.
Alder Goods didn't begin with a business plan. It began with a basement kiln, a habit of giving mugs away, and the slow realisation that the giving could become a living — if we never let it become a factory.
Two trades under one roof
Inger throws and glazes; Mads cuts and carves; Sofie weaves at the floor loom by the window. The three benches share one room on Værkstedsgade, which means the clay learns from the wood and the linen learns from both.
We cap ourselves at about forty batches a year. It is not a growth strategy. It is the number of things three people can make well without hurrying.
— Inger, Mads & Sofie
The ledger, kept since 2017
Nine years, forty-one batches
A kiln in a basement
Inger fires batch no. 1 — twelve mugs — in a second-hand kiln under her apartment. Eleven survive. All are given away, which is not yet a business.
Saturday markets
A folding table at Torvehallerne. The first ledger notebook starts here, because customers kept asking which batch their mug came from.
The shopfront
We sign the lease on Værkstedsgade 14 — a former bicycle repair shop with good north light and a floor that forgives spilled glaze.
Wood joins clay
Mads moves his joinery bench in; Sofie's loom follows that winter. The shop stops being a pottery and becomes a workshop for the whole table.
Batch no. 41
Sixty speckled mugs, fired on the third of July. The ledger is on its fourth notebook. The plan for the next nine years is the same as the last.
Three pairs of hands
Inger Dahl
Potter · Founder
Throws every vessel in the shop and still numbers each one by hand, in pencil, before the first firing.
Mads Krogh
Joiner
Cuts boards and carves spoons from Jutland oak and walnut, and runs the repairs-for-life bench on Mondays.
Sofie Lindqvist
Weaver
Weaves every throw on the floor loom by the window — eighteen per batch, each taking most of a day.
Materials
What things are made from
Stoneware clay
- Dug and blended in Skåne, an hour over the bridge. Speckles come from the iron in the soil, not from us.
Oak & walnut
- Boards and offcuts from a third-generation family sawmill in Jutland, air-dried for two years before they meet a blade.
Linen
- Flax spun in Normandy, woven on our own loom, then stone-washed so the first wash is already behind it.
Beeswax
- From two hives on the workshop roof. In a good summer they give us exactly one batch of tapers.
“We would rather make forty things a year that last forty years than the other way around.”
The only sentence in our business plan
See what's on the bench
Three batches are in the shop right now. When they're gone, they're gone until we make more.
Browse the shop