Right… we’ll come back to the sunflower later :-). First, let me tell you a bit about how it all began.

In 2013, the year after the first Baking Steel was sold in the US, I started baking on a roughly cut piece of steel. My baking was taken to new heights and I was delighted.

Baking was still just something I did to save money. I was training to be a teacher and, a couple of years earlier, had become the father of two lovely girls. My wife was also studying, so money was tight, and baking my own high-quality bread was a great blessing.

Two years later, my eldest daughter was due to start school, but we could tell she was a special girl who would find it really difficult in a mainstream state school. So we decided to home-school her (yes, that’s allowed in Denmark), and as I was also starting to feel the first signs of stress as a new teacher, I decided to set up my own business. That way, I could be there for my family during the day and work on my online shop in the evenings.

A couple of years later, in 2017, once the online shop was well established, we decided to take our two girls on a world school trip. We sold the few possessions we had, and with 7,000 EUR in our bank account, we set off with our rucksacks for South-East Asia.

Over the next year or so, we travelled around Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and Laos, met up with other world schoolers and had our fill of adventures. After a year, it was time to try something new, so we returned to Europe, bought a second-hand motorhome in Germany and spent the following year travelling around Europe, from Northern Norway and Lapland to Gibraltar.

It was a trip full of wonderful experiences and lovely memories that will last a lifetime. But, as so many others have found, life has a way of catching up with you.
I enjoyed the freedom, soaking up new experiences and running my shop from the laptop I’d brought with me, but my wife found it increasingly difficult to enjoy the unpredictability of life.
That’s why, in 2019, we set our sights back home and bought a small house in Denmark.

...and then came the coronavirus

Back in Denmark, I was able to focus more on my little shop, where I was selling 2–5 Pizza Steel products a day, and when the pandemic struck, my stock was full and I was ready for the huge sourdough trend sparked by the lockdowns and working from home during the pandemic.

It really took off in 2020, and on Black Friday we sold 1,000 Pizza Steels in a single day! That’s 7 tonnes of steel!

It was fun, but also incredibly hard work, and thankfully things have calmed down a bit since then.

The Sunflower

…and now the Sunflower comes into the picture. As you may know, the Sunflower is a symbol for people with hidden disabilities, and since 2020, first my wife and then both my daughters have been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), with all that this entails.

Although my daughters are now teenagers, they still need their dad very much, and I am deeply grateful that I can be there for them whilst also running my ‘little’ shop, not least thanks to the ability to automate many work processes, think outside the box and outsource everything to do with packing and dispatching orders to a logistics partner.