Last week, Kristian Eddé was awarded Innovation of the Year at NK Gala 2026. I am incredibly proud to receive the award, and very grateful to NK and the jury for recognising the work I have been building over the past years.
The award has also made me reflect on what innovation means to me, and what I actually want to achieve with Kristian Eddé.
When I started working with salmon leather, I was initially drawn to the material itself. Salmon skin is rarely considered a material for fashion, and I became interested in what could happen if it was treated with the same care and ambition that we normally associate with more established luxury materials.
But over time, the material became about more than the material.
Working with salmon leather has given me a way to bring questions about salmon farming and the systems behind the food we consume into an entirely different context. A piece of leather can become an entry point to a much larger discussion about how we produce salmon, what happens to the different parts of the fish, and how we decide what has value and what becomes waste.
I don't see fashion as a way of providing simple answers to those questions. Instead, I see it as a way of making people curious enough to start asking them.
That is a big part of what I want Kristian Eddé to become.
I want to use fashion as a platform to explore and communicate questions that might otherwise remain distant from the world of design. I want to create objects that people genuinely want to wear and keep, while the materials and stories behind them can open up conversations about the systems they come from.
In that sense, salmon leather is both a material and a messenger.
For me, innovation is not necessarily about inventing something that has never existed before. It can also be about looking at something that already exists and asking whether it could have another value, another purpose or another story.
This is where craftsmanship and fashion become important. Developing salmon leather is not only a technical challenge. It is about understanding the material, working with its limitations and possibilities, and pushing it far enough that it can exist in a context where people would never have expected to find it.
The products are therefore only one part of what I am trying to build with Kristian Eddé. The larger ambition is to use fashion to influence the way we think about the materials we use and, ultimately, the systems behind them.
Receiving the Innovation of the Year award from NK feels like an important recognition of that ambition. I am especially happy that it brings attention to salmon leather, but also to the idea that innovation can come from changing the way we look at something we thought we already understood.
Thank you to NK and the jury for the award and for giving Kristian Eddé a platform to continue this conversation.
There is still a lot to explore, develop and, most importantly, question.
Read more about the NK Gala winners and the jury’s motivation →
