Scandinavian textile design for home and public environments

Borås Cotton has the origins in the 1870-ies when Borås Wäfveri started to weave fabrics in the iconic building Viskaholm in the center of Borås.nAround 1900 they had about 400 looms producing cotton and woolmixed fabrics. During the first two decades of 1900 Borås Wäfveri expanded by acquiring spinning- dyeing- and printing mills in and around Borås. The textile consumption increased in Sweden in the late forties. The garment industry boomed, and fashion textile dominated Borås Wäfveris production until the end of the fifties.

In the sixties home textiles took over more and more of the production. It was also in this period textile artists began to influence what was printed.

During the sixties and seventies, Inez Svensson and Sven Fristedt put Borås Cotton on the world map with unique and bold patterns. Fristedt’s Glada Blada added color to Manhattan through Jack Lenor Larsen’s introduction. Inez Svensson’s work with the 10 group is legendary.

During the seventies and eighties, Borås Cotton grew into a world-famous brand thanks to outstanding designs and marketing through subsidiaries around the world.

In the nineties, Borås Cotton became more production-oriented and partially lost focus on design. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, they got the on paper interesting idea of ​​buying into Europe’s largest textile factory in Estonia. Unfortunately, one would soon become aware that the Russian dynamic is essentially different from what China would later display.

In line with tougher competition and a lack of focus on design, Borås Cotton disappeared from the world scene, with one exception, Japan.

In the early seventies, a Japanese company visited Borås and that was the beginning of a long collaboration that has meant that Borås Cotton is now almost more famous in Japan than in Scandinavia.

At the beginning of the 2000s, Borås Cotton started printing their classic patterns on Trevira CS and built up a solid position on the Swedish contract market. After a number of years in decline in the 2010s, Y.Berger&Co took over Borås Cotton´s interior textile part, and reintroduced timeless classics from the golden age, together with new designs, from Sven Fristedt, Lena Boije, Ann-Catrine Sigrid Stålberg, Hanna Werning and others.

“Art on fabric” describes our way of working, and stands for the connection of high quality textiles and Borås Cotton’s tradition of creating sustainable designs with the skilled designer’s freedom at the center.