Gabriel_175th Anniversary_Web_Spreads - Flipbook - Page 73
T H E I N N O V AT O R S
Materials shape
experience
Alvyda, Jeppe and Alex are part of the innovation team at Gabriel.
Coming from three different nations and backgrounds, their perspectives differ, but the subject is the same: turning complexity into something stable, repeatable - and invisible in everyday use.
Textiles don’t just cover furniture. They shape the spaces we live in.
They absorb sound, soften hard interiors, and can shift a room from
clinical to human without anyone quite noticing why. Jeppe, Danish
and trained in architecture, brings that lens into the work. He talks
about fabric the way architects talk about buildings: as something
that influences how a space feels, behaves, and is experienced - far
beyond colour and pattern.
In hospital design, that difference becomes obvious. Surround people
only with plastic, steel and vinyl - everything hygienic and hard - and
something disappears: tactility, warmth, life. Add curtains, upholstery
and soft surfaces, and the room changes. People gather there. They
linger. They move differently. The material quietly changes the experience of being somewhere.
If textiles can shape experience like architecture, the team also sees
the development as cooking.
A fabric can be described as a recipe: components, parameters, temperatures, time. But anyone who has cooked knows the truth: you can
follow a recipe and still end up somewhere else. A small variation
changes everything. Humidity. A different batch of material. A process
step that behaves slightly differently today than it did yesterday. You
learn by doing. You learn by failing, adjusting, trying again.
Alexander, German and trained as a textile engineer, lives in the same
world of practical precision: sometimes you cook to build muscle,
sometimes you cook dessert. In textiles, sometimes you build for extreme performance; sometimes you build for comfort and emotion.
Either way, the job is never only to make something look good.
It is to make it behave.
That is where the team’s favourite self-description makes sense:
detectives.
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