What is “The Pet Project”

“The Pet Project” is a luxury design-line for pets. Furniture, food-bowls and other accessories for pet-owners with a sense of style that want to make a beautiful living for their animals Each product is designed with ultimate care and out of quality materials in a minimalistic, elegant style that will look good in any home.

Who are “The Pet Project”

Lene Nendel:

Lene Nendel is educated as an industrial designer from The Design Seminarium in Denmark and has studied a year at the Polytekniko in Milan. She is now the creative CEO of “The Pet Project”.

Michael Ryding:

Michael Ryding is a self-educated store-designer who has worked with several Danish fashion-brands. He is now the CEO of “The Pet Project”.

The design-duo met while working together in a interior-decoration-firm. Not knowing each other personally, except for a few lunches together, they sensed that a collaboration would be fruitful and started the interior-setdesign-company “Nendel & Ryding” in 2002?? When Lene Nendel came up with the need for pet-things for her two cats, the pair ventured into the world of pet-design. An unexplored market with very few designed products.     

The idea behind “The Pet Project”

Why do accessories for pets often have to be ugly, overly cute or in bad taste? That was the question designer Lene Nendel asked herself when she got herself two cats and went out to buy furniture for them. And by that the idea of “The Pet Project” was born, for in cooperation with business-partner Michael Ryding the two set out to do something about it.

In 2003 they started drawing and designing and after months of hard work the result was six products. And only six for “The Pet Project” is foremost about quality and not quantity.
Lene Nendel: “The idea is to make products that both the pets will like to use and the owner like to look at. They are furniture that can be in your livingroom without having animals screamed all over them. Things that will fit into even the most design-conscious home”.

But one thing was the design, yet another to have the styles produced. Especially when you are only satisfied with the best quality.

Michael Ryding: “It took almost a year for us to have our first six products made. We might sound difficult, but we kept throwing away if the standard wasn’t good enough. And now we are very satisfied with our first collection.”

Succes from the start

Even before the first shipment was ready The Pet Project caused an enthusiastic reaction - and orders from USA and Japan.
Michael Ryding: “We were invited by the Danish consulate in New York to a pet-fair but were forewarned that we might not get so much out of it, business-wise. Maybe 12-15 requests at the most. And we were very nervous. Were we the only ones that could see the idea in our products, we asked ourselves. But being at the fair was fantastic. “Finally”, was the reaction to our products we met most and at the end of the fair we had more than 200 requests and 15 direct orders. Personally, a very gratifying result after so many months of hard work and needless to say that we went home happy.”