Most furniture labels design in one place and manufacture in another, often on the far side of the world. Dustin Jessen built Verlag der Dinge to work the other way around. A product designer trained in Essen, Eindhoven and London, he founded the company in 2021 with Maximilian Clauß and borrowed a word from publishing: a publisher backs an author and carries the work into the world, and this house does the same for objects. Its things are developed and made a short walk from where they are sold.

The clearest example is a wall hook called HKN. It is cast entirely from local plastic waste, collected and remoulded at Das Rezyklat, a Precious Plastic workshop Jessen runs with Steffen Hartwig. Old garden chairs and flower pots go in, and marbled hooks come out, each one a different swirl of colour, stamped with a date and a recycling code. The shape is stripped back to what a hook needs, its frame borrowed from Euro stacking containers.

Alongside the recycled pieces sits Laura's Mirror, two discs of turned walnut or maple that a hidden magnet snaps shut. One face is an ordinary mirror, the other magnifies five times, and the sliding magnetic catch is filed for a patent. Because the wood is natural, no two are quite alike, which suits a workshop that treats a small object with the care usually saved for something much larger.