Kopenhagen Fur

While it might sound strange, my "Economics of the Food Industry" class took a field trip to what many people in American would consider a very controversial place: the largest fur company in Europe known as Kopenhagen Fur. We took taxis from campus to about 20 km outside the city to Kopenhagen Fur's auction house/handling and distribution facility. If you were wondering, I am not spelling "Kopenhagen" incorrectly; spelling the name with a "K" is their stylistic feature.

The entrance to the building resembled that of a 4 or 5 star hotel; meant to impress the handful of wealthy auctioneers. The vast majority of them are from Hong Kong and China. We were given these official name tags when we walked through the doors.

                                              

Soon after, we were led into the auction room, which proved to be quite astounding once I found out the quantity of money that was being spent about every 5 seconds.

Each lot ranged from 1000-4000 furs, which were each going anywhere from $100-250. If you do the math, each lot was ranging from $100,000 to $1,000,000. And like I said, auctioneers were spending this amount of money every few seconds. Incredible. 

There are 5 auctions that occur at this facility a year, and each auction sells around 4-6 million furs. Kopenhagen Fur's revenue came out to be about $2 billion last year. 

Our guide gave us a presentation that for one sparked my interest in business in general, as well as cleared up the negative stigma that lies behind the fur industry. It really is not as harmful as most people believe it to be. 

Then we took a tour of the viewing area of the furs, as well as the area where they would usually be processed and graded. 

 By the way, chinchilla fur is by far the most soft. Mink fur is the most popular though.

After the tour had concluded, we had the chance to eat in the most amazing cafeteria I have ever seen. Any type of food you could ever imagine (all danish at heart though). They even had beer and wine dispensers, all for free. But when you think about it, most of the people eating in the cafeteria had already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars already that day. So I guess you could say they deserve a free gourmet meal. 

The lamb dish was incredible