How the Danes Became Masters of the Global Fur Business

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Schumpeter | Adventures in the Skin Trade; How the Danes became masters of the global fur business. Economist, May 3, 2014.
www.economist.com/news/business/ ... ventures-skin-trade

Quote:

“Kopenhagen Fur has so many Chinese buyers at its auctions—about half of the 600 who typically attend—that it has a Chinese restaurant on the premises, produces a special Chinese edition of Fur Times, and even puts up discreet notices on how to use Western lavatories. * * * Outside, Chinese fur traders in brightly coloured tracksuits wreathe the place in tobacco smoke. In all, Kopenhagen Fur accounts for about a third of Denmark’s exports to China.

“Denmark is an agricultural superpower, so the farmers have a constant supply of offal and fish waste to feed to the mink * * * The farms welcome visitors.

“Hudson’s Bay Company of Canada [, founded 1670, is] the world’s oldest fur firm

“The average Danish mink farmer has made €365,000 a year in profits for the past five years.

Danes boast of “having the world’s best pelts, the global industry’s most influential auction house

Note:
(a) “THE headquarters of Kopenhagen Fur “is a slice of 1960s brutalist architecture dropped into the homely Copenhagen suburb of Glostrup.”

Brutalist architecture
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture
(flourished from the 1950s to the mid-1970s; Examples are typically massive in character (even when not large), fortresslike, with a predominance of exposed concrete construction)

(b) “Denmark is home to 1,500 mink farmers who together rear about 17.2m of the mammals a year—about one-fifth of the world’s supply. It also produces much smaller quantities of other furs such as white fox and chinchilla. Danish food companies produce the world’s most nutritious mink food, a mephitic, fishy concoction.”
(i) Arctic fox
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_fox
(also known as whie fox)
(ii) chinchilla
The chinchilla (whose name literally means "little chincha;" is named after the Chincha people of the Andes, who once wore its dense, velvet-like fur)
(iii) mephitic (adj): “of, relating to, or resembling mephitis [qv]:  foul-smelling”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mephitic