At Bolia, we love creating beautiful spaces designed to inspire personal growth and boost creativity. What was permanent and formal before is becoming fluid and flexible. It calls for new perspectives on how we organize, how we work, and how we share our creativity. Creating a culture built on honesty and trust where diversity, equality and inclusion are a matter of course and complementary terms that depend on each other. It’s about empowering people, cherish fluidity and encourage personal growth in a nourishing and inspiring environment. Welcome to the new ways of working. Everyone in Bolia has an important voice, and we share our knowledge and ideas to improve our work – and our world. And reimagining our work life will bring more meaning and balance to our lives and more sustainable results to our business.
Explore our creative universe, our dreams and ambitions, and all the things that move us in our film below.
-
Power to the people
Our Bolia family has grown to more than 800 passionate colleagues, 68 talented designers, 39 skilled manufacturers, more than 500 trusted agents and dealers around the world, as well as lots of valued partners and specialists that support our business. All have an important voice, and we share our knowledge and ideas to improve our work, our workplace – and our world. Creating a positive company culture, both internally and externally, built on our core values: people, creativity, and quality.
Our values are rooted in the Scandinavian design traditions and way of life. Honesty, trust, respect, equality, and inclusion shape the platform for how we run our business, how we meet our customers, and how we collaborate with our designers and partners. We value respect, equality, and responsible work conditions in a safe, healthy, non-judgmental, and inspiring work environment. That is also why we work ambitiously to empower and support all our wonderful colleagues and partners around the world. We are members of amfori BSCI and our manufacturers follow the BSCI code of conduct, ensuring the rights and safety of everyone involved in our design universe.
A good example of sustainable production is our new Bolia Journal with its 276 pages produced on FSC® certified paper, with local sourcing and production. We plan the development and production together with our friends from MÅLBAR and managed to minimise the climate footprint to be equal to that of only 0,91 average cheeseburger.
Facts about us
Our wonderful, international family consists of talented people with the following gender distribution: 73% female, 26% male, and 1% identify as another gender. In our senior management team, the distribution is 44% female and 56% male, while the distribution of the managers referring to them are 78% female and 22% male.
We are an international design company established in 2000, who loves creating new Scandinavian design and beautiful spaces at home, at work and in the space in between. Our international Head office is located in the heart of the cultural city of Aarhus, in beautiful, historic buildings dating back to 1862, that originally served as locomotive workshops for the Danish railways. We have restored and furnished this beautiful setting with respect for history and architecture. In these same authentic beautiful buildings, you will also find a very special Bolia flagship store. This much more than a Bolia design store, it is also a place where we test new designs, concepts, and ideas before they are launched globally and a store we use for training of new colleagues and partners from around the world. You are always welcome to drop by for a cup of organic La Cabra coffee and experience it all yourself if you are in our city.
-
The Bolia history
Bolia was born in year 2000 in the heart of Aarhus, a Danish city with a strong creative background and culture. Already then, Bolia was a very different type of company, since it was probably the first furniture company in the world operating a retail business on a web-based platform offering the complete collection for sale online.
-
At the same time, we carried no designs on stock. All products were made to order, so when the customers placed an order online, the dedicated manufacturer started production and shipped it fresh from the factory floor to the customer’s home.
We designed the web-based sales platform and presented the collection in city-located showrooms. Production and distribution were completely outsourced to European partners. That was a huge furniture revolution back in year 2000, and in many ways, it still is today. -
During the first years the collection consisted of curated products from various European suppliers and in year 2005, we decided to change our range strategy to evolve into a full-blown design company and we therefore started teaming up with talented designers. It was also during this period we really developed our passion for New Scandinavian Design and followed the wonderful path we are still on today.
The wonderful journey ahead
Thankfully, this is only the beginning – we are on a never-ending journey towards something better, always exploring new ideas and dreams, future opportunities and expansions. If you would like a sneak peek into the future, we invite you to enjoy our thrilling podcast series “The 20 next years” featuring fascinating international thinkers and thought-provoking topics about what the future might bring. Find it at Bolia.com, Spotify, or iTunes.