S1.E11. How a Chef Ended Up Designing Glassware for the Danish Royal Wedding + Sold 400M Glasses

If you’re a bartender, a chef, a bar manager, or a hospitality professional quietly wondering whether this trade leads anywhere beyond the next service, this episode is for you. Manuel sits down with Jesper Efferbach, owner of Jeff&CO, a Danish designer whose career started in hospitality and ended up producing glassware for the Danish Royal Wedding. Hundreds of millions of glasses later, he is still convinced that the most valuable training he ever got was the years he spent in a kitchen.

From the Kitchen to the Drawing Board

Jesper did not set out to become a designer. He started where a lot of us start: in hospitality, on the floor and in the kitchen, learning a craft with his hands and learning people at the same time. What he describes is not a clean career pivot but a slow translation. The instincts he built cooking and serving turned out to be exactly the instincts a product designer needs, because both jobs answer the same question: what does this person actually want to feel when they sit down?

That is the thread running through the whole conversation. Hospitality is not a detour from a serious career, it is a training ground for one. Timing, taste, pressure, reading a room, delivering under a deadline that will not move: those are transferable skills, and most people in this industry undersell them badly.

Glassware for a Royal Wedding

The centrepiece of the episode is the story most designers never get to tell: creating glassware for the wedding of the Crown Prince and Crown Princess of Denmark. Jesper walks through what that brief felt like, what it demands of you technically, and what it is like to later stand in the Royal Castle and see your own work on the table.

He also talks about meeting the Danish Queen, and about the strange gap between the scale of the moment and the ordinariness of the work that leads to it. There is no shortcut in the story. There are years of production, iteration and unglamorous problem solving, and then one day the phone rings for something that will be photographed for a generation. Big opportunities land on people who were already doing the small work properly.

First Impressions Are Part of the Meal

Ask a designer of glassware what a guest tastes first and you get an answer most operators overlook. Before the drink, there is the weight of the glass, the temperature of the room, the way the table is set, the greeting at the door. Jesper is direct about how much of the guest’s verdict is formed in those first seconds, long before the kitchen or the bar has had a chance to prove anything.

For anyone running a venue, this is a cheap and immediate lever. You may not be able to rebuild your menu this month, but you can fix what the guest meets in their first thirty seconds. Design the arrival, not just the product.

You Are Not Selling Food and Drinks. You Are Selling an Experience

This is the line that reframes everything else. Restaurants and bars, Jesper argues, are experience businesses that happen to serve food and drink. The plate and the glass are the delivery mechanism, not the offer. Once you accept that, every decision changes: what you spend on, what you train for, which corners genuinely cannot be cut.

It also explains why he ended up in design at all. Choosing the vessel a guest drinks from is not decoration, it is part of the experience you are charging for. The object in the guest’s hand is doing as much work as the recipe in it.

Preparation, Pressure and Leading a Team

Kitchens teach a specific kind of leadership: prepare obsessively, then stay calm when the plan meets reality. Jesper connects the discipline of mise en place directly to how he now runs a business, briefs clients and manages production. The chef’s habit of front-loading the work is, in his telling, the single most portable thing hospitality gives you.

Preparation is what turns pressure into performance instead of panic. Teams do not rise to the occasion under stress; they fall back on what they prepared.

Why the Second Visit Beats the First Sale

Jesper closes on something every operator says they believe and far fewer act on: the repeat customer is worth more than the first one. A first sale can be bought with marketing, a discount, or a good week on social media. A second visit has to be earned by the experience itself, and it is the only number that compounds. He applies the same logic to his own trade, where a client who comes back for the next production run is worth more than any single order.

Key Advice for Chefs, Bartenders & Owners:

• Your hospitality skills are business skills. Pressure, timing and reading people transfer to any career you choose next.
• Design the first thirty seconds. The guest forms a verdict before the first plate or drink ever arrives.
• Chase the second visit, not the first sale. Repeat guests are the only growth that compounds.

Listen Now & Get Inspired

Tune in to the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts. Whether you’re plating your first service, running a bar, or wondering what else your years in hospitality could become, Jesper’s route from the kitchen to the Royal Castle is a useful reminder of how far this trade can actually take you.

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