BITTE KAI RAND was founded in 1981 by the eponymous designer who, fresh out of the Royal Danish Design Academy, acquired the most prolific Danish knitting workshop of the time, "Steen's hjemmestrikkerier", and quickly became Copenhagen’s equivalent to Sonia Rykiel in Paris.

All items were made to order and the designer got a firm grasp on what customers require from their clothes and how to fit clothes to real bodies rather than standard shapes.

“I didn’t have a strategy or a goal. I never made a business plan. I just loved going to work every day,” remembers BITTE KAI RAND.

Fortunately, her husband, Michael Rand, had an eye for Bitte's potential as well as her talent. In 1983 he joined the company and together they created the long-lasting success that has brought the special Bitte design sensibility to style-savvy women all over the world - long before "Scandi Cool" was even a fashion term.

A few years in, the creative director learned how to scale her supply to demand, and soon became a household name in the most prestigious fashion outlets in Denmark as well as in department stores and design boutiques in Stockholm, Oslo, London, New York, and Antwerp.

Today the BITTE KAI RAND team can look back on four unpredictable decades. From the 80s sculptural shoulders and drop-crotch pants, the 90s designer denim and logo tees, into the 00s play with proportions to the 10s exploration of what is at the core of the brand’s aesthetics. The masculine versus the feminine, the architectural lines versus the organic forms, the artistic prints versus the monochrome surfaces.

The brand has been ahead of the game, featuring real people in their advertising since the ’90s including a mother breastfeeding her child, an older lady with a gold tooth and a gorgeous street cast of shiny, happy people from all over the world.

More than ever the heritage of the brand is preserved because passion, playfulness and a refusal to follow conventional commercial restraints or short-lived trends are still at the heart of each collection. The clothes are created for real people, colourful parties, work, pleasure and play. They are created for all the women who would rather stand out than fit in.