For most of its history Struer was a loading place for other people's goods. Holstebro, inland, needed somewhere to take delivery of timber shipped down from Norway, and the shore at Venø Bay served the purpose. In 1860 the settlement counted 159 inhabitants.

Two things changed the arithmetic. In 1825 a storm tore through the Agger isthmus and opened the Limfjord directly to the North Sea; by 1831 the first ship had passed through the Agger channel, and the fjord towns found themselves on a sea route rather than at the end of a cul-de-sac. Then, on 17 November 1865, the last stretch of the Langå-Struer railway ran in from Skive. The population had nearly quadrupled to 592 by 1870. Struer became a railway town in the fullest sense - the Danish State Railways, DSB, ran its West Jutland administration out of the station until the end of the 1960s, and more than three hundred DSB staff still work in the town. Market-town privileges followed in 1917.

Sixty years to the day after the railway arrived, on 17 November 1925, Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen founded a company. Olufsen had been born at Quistrup, the family manor just south of Struer, in 1897; Bang was born in 1900. The first workspace was the attic of that manor, which Svend's parents made available for the experiments.

Neither man had a long run. Olufsen died in 1949, Bang in 1957 - early enough that the brand's reputation as shorthand for Danish design was built largely by people who never met them. What the two engineers did establish was the pattern that still defines the place: a company whose products travel everywhere, run from a town most of its customers will never visit.

Bang & Olufsen is still headquartered in Struer, on a street named after itself, and still listed on Nasdaq Copenhagen under the ticker BO B. It reported revenue of roughly 2.6 billion Danish kroner for 2024/25 and employed about 1,119 people worldwide, selling through some 444 stores in more than seventy countries. Televisions still carry the Beovision name.

Older descriptions of the town claim the company employs almost a third of Struer's population. That arithmetic no longer works: with roughly 1,100 employees across the entire world, B&O cannot be a third of a town of nearly ten thousand. What remains true is the dependency in the other direction. The company is the reason a Jutland market town has an internationally known name, and the reason its fortunes are followed rather more closely here than the share price of a mid-cap audio manufacturer usually is anywhere.

Struer Museum occupies the former home of the writer Johannes Buchholtz, and its large exhibition sets old and new B&O products alongside famous pieces of Danish design furniture - the industrial history and the aesthetic history in one room.

The railway left its own inheritance. The central part of the well-maintained station is among the oldest station buildings in Denmark, and one of the oldest now houses the administration and science laboratories of Struer Statsgymnasium, one of the few Danish schools offering the International Baccalaureate. Down at the water there is a three-masted schooner. Built in 1919, sold to Sweden in 1939, back to Denmark, then to an American owner in 1968 who renamed her Marilyn Anne, she was eventually bought by Struer Municipality in 1978. Since then she has worked as a training ship for disadvantaged Danish children - a hull older than the town's fame, still earning its keep.

For a town this size, Struer sends an odd assortment of people out into the world. Harald Agger, born here in 1889, threw the hammer at the 1908 Summer Olympics. Arne Høyer, born 1928, took a team bronze in sprint canoeing at the 1960 Games. Jens Jørgen Hansen made 417 club appearances for Esbjerg fB and won 39 caps for Denmark.

Then there is Morten Andersen, raised in Struer and eventually elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame - a Danish boy who became one of American football's great placekickers. The singer and composer Janne Mark was born here in 1973; the politician Alex Vanopslagh grew up here; and two racing drivers, Morten Dons and Mikkel O. Pedersen, were both born in Struer within a decade of each other. Sound, speed, and long-range accuracy: not a bad summary of the local output.