She unsubscribed. And she was right – #118

Last week I told you I had deleted 1,734 subscribers who never opened this newsletter. A few days later, a reader replied to say she had now unsubscribed too. Very deliberately.

Her reason: Despite the name, this is mostly a newsletter from Northwestern Europe with Love.

The uncomfortable part is that this wasn’t news to me. The blind spot had come up before.

I agreed with the criticism then, too. I like to think I value critical feedback, but valuing it in theory is the easy part. Apparently, I was waiting for it to become inconvenient enough to act on.

So I counted. Of the 546 products featured so far, 86 are German and 75 British. Ukraine and Serbia: zero. Slovenia, Romania, Estonia, and Latvia: one each. On the map, Europe looks like a weather system stuck between Copenhagen and Milan.

I’d love to blame an algorithm, but unfortunately, the algorithm is me. I pick everything by hand, using magazines, fairs, and sources that tend to look where the design industry already looks. Mostly west. Mostly north. That explains the bias. It doesn’t fix it.

I’m not going to fill quotas or force a Latvian toaster into the newsletter because the spreadsheet looks lonely. But I am changing where I search. The Baltics, the Balkans, the islands, the countries with fewer people than Berlin: They are now part of the weekly route, not an occasional detour.

The map will take time to rebalance. This week is a start: Poland, Slovenia, Iceland, Croatia, and Czechia.

And I’d love your help. Know a small maker or designer from an underrepresented corner of Europe? Reply and tell me. I read everything.

Five things from Europe, below.

If you’re new around here: Every week, I share 5 of the nicest products from Europe I’ve discovered in the past 7 days.

I scout, you explore.

With love 🌞
Jakob

P.S.: Missed the last edition? Your favorite last week, by some distance: the Numbra lamp by &Tradition. Runner-up: Matt Dixon’s Memories print.

P.P.S.: If you’ve found something from Europe that belongs here, send it my way.

A reader sent me to Oskar Zięta’s Zieta Studio, best known for the Plopp stool, but I went straight for the Bolid. I have a thing for skateboards, especially when the deck starts as two flat steel sheets welded together and inflated with compressed air. Each one deforms differently. Controlled loss of control, now on wheels. (more sculpture than skateboard, though the wheels are real.)

Niko Kralj designed the Rex 120 in 1953. Rex Kralj still produces the lounge chair in oak or walnut, and more than two million of Kralj’s chair designs have been made over the years. Slovenia has appeared once in 546 FEWL finds. A poor showing from me, not from Slovenia.

Iceland has appeared exactly once in over 546 FEWL newsletter finds. Varma alone makes that hard to defend: The company has been knitting Icelandic wool since 1926. Its Lava Fields blanket is woven entirely in Iceland from local wool, with a jacquard pattern that turns volcanic plains into purple-and-gray geometry.

Prostoria started with Croatian modernist Vjenceslav Richter’s workspace principles and asked Richter+ to extend it into the VR51 Desk. Slender steel tubes, sculpted wood, no wasted gesture. It’s available on request, which suits a desk with a manifesto behind it. Croatia’s second FEWL appearance is not easing in.

High tech from Czechia, with no patience for lock-in. Prusa Research’s fully enclosed 3D printer CORE One+ comes with published CAD files, open-source firmware, and no locked bootloader. “You own your 3D printer, not just a license to use it” should be obvious. In 2026, it sounds rebellious.