It wouldn’t be a huge exaggeration to say that Tekla made bedding and towels “cool”.

Before its time, the home textiles category was dominated by legacy players trading in the basics – your plain white duvet cover, your hotel-style bath towel. It was the kind of thing people added to a wedding registry and never thought about again.

Suddenly, a Copenhagen-based brand offering a waffle-weave bath towel in dusty sage, or a set of bed covers in a perfect pink came on the scene, making these often overseen items something to think about, and crucially, in our algorithmic age, something to photograph.

“We entered a category full of legacy businesses, where our disruption was more about how we could inspire people to think beyond the plain white bedding set,” says Kristoffer Juhl, Tekla’s Managing Director and Co-Founder. “The way we built the brand, with authenticity, consistency, and a real point of view, wasn’t something you really saw in bedding and bath at the time.”

Crucially, Juhl says, Tekla didn’t try to be all things to all people. Instead, it carved out a specific aesthetic universe driven by considered materials and specific colour palettes. Juhl describes it as an understanding that the objects you surround yourself with at home say something about who you are. Almost 10 years ago, this was quite a niche idea.

Since then, Juhl says the general customer has “matured a lot”. “There’s an increasing appetite for quality and a genuine desire to invest in the home,” he adds. Even the bigger players, he notes, have had to respond.

A decade in, the brand’s influence is hard to overstate. Tekla’s colour drops are tracked with the kind of anticipation usually reserved for sneaker releases. Its collaborations sit at the intersection of fashion and interiors in a way few home brands have managed. The towel, of all things, has become a design object.

Nowhere is that seriousness of intent more evident than in Tekla’s increasingly ambitious presence at 3daysofdesign, Copenhagen’s annual design festival and one of the most watched events on the global design calendar. The festival has grown to include over 400 exhibitors, with Tekla consistently among its most talked-about participants.

In 2023, the brand transformed its newly-opened Copenhagen store in partnership with Artek, and in 2024, the collaboration developed to see Tekla celebrate Aino Aalto through a collection of duvet covers featuring her cherry blossom “kirsikankukka” print.

Then came 2026’s The Heart of Living. Staged at Charlottenborg Palace, the exhibition explored the tradition of patchwork quilting, with pieces tracing the history and inspiration behind the brand – cotton bedding fabrics in colours drawn from Tekla’s archive, displayed alongside antique Swedish quilting patterns and heirloom-inspired broderie anglaise.

The beds themselves were inspired by traditional box beds found in working-class Scandinavian homes, handmade in Copenhagen from pine and designed with architecture practice Mentze Ottenstein.

In a way, to fully understand Tekla’s success, you have to take into account Copenhagen’s trajectory, too. The city has become something of a cultural export in its own right – a shorthand for a certain kind of aspirational living that the rest of the world can’t quite replicate but keeps trying to.

The “Copenhagen cool girl” aesthetic that dominates mood boards is not accidental – it’s the product of a city that takes lifestyle seriously. “In Copenhagen, the home holds importance,” Juhl says. “We host a lot and invest in high-quality pieces early.” He describes a daily life shaped by proximity to nature and a design legacy that runs deeper than trend.

This environment has been formative for Tekla, but as a home base, but as a platform for international expansion. “Copenhagen is an exciting place to bet on yourself,” Juhl says. “There is a strong local community, great talent that understands design and a supportive system that makes risk feel manageable.”

What’s perhaps most striking about Tekla’s story is how steady it has been. No radical pivots, no chasing trends, no sudden category sprawl. Just a consistent commitment to the same core idea, season after season.

“Ten years in, that consistency has become Tekla’s integrity,” Juhl says. “And honestly, it still feels like we’re just getting started.”