For Dutch Design Week 2025, Eindhoven designer Job van den Berg took apart retired store interiors from FREITAG and rebuilt them as a small series of one-off lamps. The Zurich bag maker’s old pegboards and hooks were shown in their new form on the ground floor of Piet Hein Eek’s showroom in Eindhoven.
Working in cycles has been part of FREITAG’s approach since 1993. This time the brand asked what should happen when its own shop fittings reach the end of their life. It handed the question to the Eindhoven designer, whose practice starts with the material and moves forward through hands-on experiment. He dismantled the robust, long-serving store furniture and reassembled the parts into objects with a character of their own.
The result is a compact collection of table, pendant and floor lamps made from the old pegboards. Leftover truck tarp from FREITAG’s bag production is added to each piece, so no two are alike. The panels keep their grid of holes, which once held products on the shop wall and now lets the light through.
Truck Crash
The series also includes wall pieces made by flattening secondhand toy trucks in a hydraulic press. They refer to van den Berg’s earlier Car Crash collection and are renamed Truck Crash here, a nod to the road as the source of FREITAG’s raw material.
A new cycle
“At FREITAG, we think in cycles not just for our products, but for everything we do,” says Thomas Wakeford, creative director at FREITAG. In his view, van den Berg did more than recycle the parts and found a new character and function within them.
For van den Berg, the store parts were fascinating to work with. “My goal was to respect the past while transforming them into playful, surprising upcycled objects,” he says.
The exhibition, titled Reused. Remade. Repurposed., ran from October 18 to 26, 2025, in the space of Piet Hein Eek, the Eindhoven designer long associated with upcycling. All the one-off pieces on show were offered for sale through the designer. The project joins other work on Sketchure that begins with discarded material, such as 350.000 Ha’s guest lounge for ARCOmadrid.
Design: Job van den Berg / @jobberg
Photography: Ronald Smits / @ronaldsmits; Job van den Berg (making-of)
Location: Piet Hein Eek, Eindhoven, Netherlands
