DAMPA_75_years_of_quiet_design_ENG - Flipbook - Page 156
Dæmpa’s next managing director, Jesper Drejet, who was
appointed in 1982, would bring postmodernism to the company’s Tommerup factory, along with many other initiatives.
Drejet was the son of the high-profile and well-regarded
businessman Aksel Drejet, who was chairman of J. Lauritzen Holding, a large Danish shipping and shipbuilding
conglomerate. Unlike his predecessors at Dæmpa, Jesper
Drejet’s career had begun in what was Denmark’s first truly
global business – the East Asiatic Company (Østasiatisk
Kompagni), which in the 1960s was also its biggest conglomerate with subsidiaries located all over the world making food, chemical products and manufactured goods of
extraordinary variety. In the mid-1970s, Drejet attended
Stanford Business School in the USA, after which he joined
F.L. Smidth in 1978. With such formative experiences, he
was used to thinking big and bringing forth bold ideas. For
Dæmpa, his arrival was initially a breath of fresh air, but once
in post, he began a whirlwind of new initiatives.
156
Two million kroner were allocated to be spent on staff training to upskill the middle management, the idea being that
they would in future have responsibility for all day-to-day
operational matters, leaving the senior management to deal
with larger strategic matters concerning expansion and
diversification. Turnover in 1982 was 150 million kroner but
Drejet hoped that within a year it would come closer to 250
million – a highly ambitious aim. He advocated shifting the
company’s culture from being production-orientated to
being market-orientated, changing from being a provider of
building and ship interior components to becoming a supplier of complete solutions for interiors of high design quality.
This approach was precedented in the company’s collaboration with Rockwool to coordinate the installation of DCC
ceilings with its wall panel system in ships – an approach
warmly welcomed by shipyards and their clients, leading to
significantly increased sales and revenue. Becoming what is
nowadays known as a ‘turnkey’ supplier of whole interiors
appeared to Drejet to be a logical further development from
this tentative beginning.
