Hans Ehrich

In 2022, Hans Ehrich founded the "Foundation for Industrial Design", which has the task of rewarding a young, promising industrialdesign student with a scholarship and a diploma. Four professors, working at four prominent universities with design education at the university level, will each nominate a candidate. A jury will then select the winner of "The Hans Ehrich Design Award for Excellent Young Industrial Design". The award ceremony will take place in Vitemölla and the prize money in 2022 is SEK 85,000.

Until the year 2002, A&E Design had been rewarded the “Excellent Swedish Design” (14 times), the “Red Dot” (5 times, of which 3 in the category “The Best of the Best”), together with a considerable number of national and international design awards. The worldwide successes have led to the nomination of Hans Ehrich as a member of the jury of the “red dot design award” since 2002.

Very well known is also the “Turn-O-Matic M80” queue ticket dispenser and number indicator from 1974. When the year 2005, in Sweden, was declared “The Year of Design”, the work of Swedish designers was honored by the Swedish Post by editing five stamps with well-known and successful products, of which one stamp pictured the “Turn-O-Matic” queue ticket dispenser.

Ehrich's passion for cars was also expressed in his industrial design examination project at Konstfack in 1967. Together with Roland Lindhé, he developed a most paid attention to electric town car with three seats, called “Optima”. The self-supporting body of the concept car was intended to be made of plastic and aluminum. It had, among many other items, pump-free and puncture- proof tires, safety belts and a smooth and soft, shock-absorbing interior. Ehrich's and Lindhé's car existed only as a mock up, but the information about it was spread worldwide by a Swedish news agency. The authors were contacted from different countries, by people who wanted to buy the car. “Optima” was rewarded the first prize in the Ford design competition, presented in Munich in 1967.

From 1962 to 1967 he studied at the department for metal crafts, with concentration on silver and goldsmith training at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design (Konstfack) in Stockholm. He mixed his studies with trainee periods at Italian car producers in Milan and Turin, where he, among others, met Giorgetto Giugiaro, who asked him to join the recently established Italdesign company. The result of the studies in Turin was a large number of car design projects, among those a “Two door Sports Coupé” and a “2,5 Litre Gran Turismo Convertible”.

Hans Ehrich (born 25 September 1942 in Kulosaari [currently Helsinki], Finland) is a Swedish industrial designer. Together with Tom Ahlström he, in 1968, founded A&E Design, a company which Ehrich still (2022) manages. Between 1982 and 2002 he was the CEO of the sister company Interdesign in Stockholm. Internationally, he is regarded one of Sweden's leading product designers, and is referred to as the “Grand Seigneur” of Swedish industrial design. Ehrich is living in Stockholm and Berlin.

Hans Ehrich's mother was the Swedish woman Liten-Karin Sundberg, and his father the German artist Otto Ehrich, who in 1936 emigrated to Finland, where the son Hans was born in Kulosaari in 1942. During the Finnish Continuation War the family fled to Sweden in 1944.