BHK Vietnam – From Furniture Offcuts to Hairpins

Some business relationships remain business relationships.

Others slowly become something else.

BHK is one of the latter.

We originally met through Avanova and their handmade wooden hairpins. By now, when we are in Saigon, we meet because we actually want to see each other. Our families go out together, eat, talk, drag children along and occasionally remember that somewhere underneath all this there is technically still a supplier-customer relationship.

I rather prefer it this way.

Starting with what is left over

The basic material for many of the hairpins is wood that already had another destination.

Furniture production produces off-cuts: pieces too small or inconveniently shaped for the furniture itself, but often made from perfectly beautiful wood.

Instead of treating those pieces as waste, our friend at BHK looks at them and asks a considerably more interesting question:

What can this become?

Quite often, the answer is a hairpin.

The wood is cut and shaped, then carved, polished and finished by hand. BHK works with several natural woods and generally leaves their actual colour visible rather than covering them with paint. A beeswax and mineral-oil finish protects the surface while still allowing the grain to remain part of the design.

A narrow strip that was useless to a furniture maker may therefore end up holding somebody's hair together on the other side of the world.

I like that transformation very much.

A surprisingly complicated stick

At its simplest, a hairpin is just a stick.

This is another one of those objects that becomes much more complicated the moment somebody starts caring about it.

It has to be smooth enough not to catch the hair. The taper has to work. It should be strong without becoming unnecessarily heavy. The curve and balance matter when it is actually worn.

And then, once all those practical questions have been dealt with, somebody inevitably starts carving flowers into it.

Or adding stones.

Or attaching a tassel.

Or combining the wood with resin and dried flowers.

At which point the supposedly simple stick has developed ambitions.

Traditional object, contemporary workshop

Hairpins have a long history in Vietnam and elsewhere across East and Southeast Asia, but I do not think traditional objects have to remain frozen in whichever century somebody decided was the authentic one.

BHK's work moves comfortably between both worlds.

Some designs are restrained and depend almost entirely on the wood itself. Others borrow floral forms or traditional-looking silhouettes. Then there are pieces with resin, decorative metalwork, stones, dangling ornaments and rather more playful ideas.

The point is not to reproduce an artefact from a museum.

It is to keep making hairpins people actually want to wear.

The people behind the work

What makes BHK particularly important to us, though, has rather little to do with individual products.

They are creative people who genuinely enjoy other creative people.

That sounds trivial until you spend enough time around businesses where everything outside the immediate sales calculation is considered somebody else's problem.

BHK has repeatedly supported young artists and musicians around them, not in the grand corporate sense of putting a sponsorship logo on a banner, but simply because they like what those people are doing and want to encourage them.

Once, while we were in Saigon, we went together to a final concert by university music students.

One of the performances was genuinely excellent – the kind where you stop thinking about the fact that you are sitting at a student concert and simply listen.

And there, as part of the musician's appearance on stage, was one of BHK's hairpins.

It was a small detail.

But I remember it.

An object made from a piece of leftover wood had travelled through a workshop, through somebody's hands and into another young artist's performance.

That is a much more interesting life for a furniture off-cut than becoming firewood.

When suppliers become friends

Business writing tends to prefer clean categories.

Supplier. Customer. Partner. Manufacturer. Retailer.

Real life is considerably less organised.

You talk to somebody because you want to buy their work. Then you talk about something else. Eventually you meet their family. Your children meet. Somebody suggests dinner. The next time you are in the country, meeting them is simply part of the trip.

At some point the word supplier starts sounding rather inadequate.

This has happened more than once during the history of Avanova, but BHK is probably one of the clearest examples.

And I think it explains why the People & Craft section exists better than any mission statement could.

Things made by people

Yes, we like the hairpins.

We like that off-cuts from furniture making are turned into something worth keeping. We like the grain of the wood, the carving, the occasional extravagance of flowers and stones and tassels.

But after enough years, the object is no longer the whole reason we care.

There are people behind it.

People who make things, support other people making things, build a business around their creativity and still find time to meet us for dinner when we arrive in Saigon.

That is worth considerably more than another article explaining why handmade wooden hairpins are supposedly “timeless accessories for the modern woman”.

We have enough of that kind of internet already.