Bang & Olufsen

The brand

History

Bang & Olufsen was born on 17 November 1925, in the borrowed attic of Quistrup, the Olufsen family's country estate in Struer, in Danish Jutland. Peter Bang, a self-taught engineer fascinated by electronics, and Svend Olufsen, who had a talent for business, had met shortly before, just after finishing their studies, and joined forces through a shared passion for technical experiments. Their first great achievement came quickly: the Eliminator, a revolutionary device that allowed a radio to be plugged straight into the mains, removing the need for the heavy batteries that were indispensable at the time — an innovation that put the pair on the map of the European electrical industry back in the 1920s.

The following decades produced some of the most recognisable objects of twentieth-century industrial design: reinvented turntables, touch-sensitive controls long before they existed in any other consumer product, and an aesthetic language that Bang & Olufsen calls 'sound, design and craftsmanship' — the three pillars behind every launch to this day. Struer remains the physical and symbolic heart of the brand: a 25,000 m² factory with around 500 employees, where 'Factory 5' is entirely dedicated to shaping anodised aluminium, the material that became the company's visual signature.

The recognition goes far beyond the consumer market. Pieces such as the Beolab 6000 and Beolab 8000 received iF Design awards in 1993, and since 1972 — confirmed by a letter signed by the architect Philip Johnson himself — Bang & Olufsen products have been part of the permanent design collection of MoMA in New York. Listed on the Copenhagen stock exchange since 1977, the company celebrated its centenary in 2025 with the same commitment as its founding duo: to create timeless objects that change the way people hear, see and feel the world.