We had a study trip to Helsinki with our GFB1 class on Monday 5.2.2018
We all met around 14 PM and our first place to visit was Concept Store TRE (Mikonkatu 6). TRE is a lifestyle and design shop (opened in August 2016), it’s a quite small but full of interesting and different products.
Our guide, Tanja Sipilä, told us that they have over 300 brands in their store. There are all kinds of products like clothes, furnitures, accessories, shoes and cards. But they still have more than just design, for example different ecological hand soaps and toothpastes. All the products are on sale. Most of the design is Finnish but there is also some Estonian design. Tanja told that half of the TRE store sellers are designers themselves as well. That helps them to sell their products better because they can always tell the stories behind the products or the designers for the customers (easier than in webshops, for example).
Besides the products, TRE Store sells different concepts and does collaborations with other companies/events. Last year they made a collab with Flow Festival. TRE Store have also made a pop-up shop in Korea, there is circa 80 Finnish brands in that Korean pop-up shop.
16 PM to Polhem Showroom Finland (Keskuskatu 1 B, 4th floor). First our guide Silja Ahonen told that the company is Swedish based and has started in 1995. Helsinki office has been running since 2002.
Polhem Showroom offers different kind of advertising/product placement, services and events. They have round about 96 brands. They have beauty products (hair, makeup etc), fashion, sport&lifestyle clothing and also home furniture.
Idea is that the customers pay for Polhem, so that their products would be in the limelight in a best way (for example magazines). Polhem also makes a lot collaborations with popular bloggers and vloggers.
Silja told about how important is to create and invent new and different things all the time to the customer events, also you must be as social as possible in customer meetings and showroom sessions. For Polhem it’s necessary to trying to find the ‘’right kind of people’’ to work with them, one example; sufficient amount of followers so that there is going to be advertising enough. In Finland there is 3-4 competitors for Polhem Showroom.
At the end of the day we went to the Finnish Fashion Law Association (Eversheds asianajotoimisto Oy, Fabianinkatu 29 B 8th floor). The welcoming was fantastic, people from FFLA offered us some food and drinks for openers! (It was needed after a long day).
Our guide Roosa Hasu along other her colleagues told us that the company is pretty fresh, started 2014. Including 150 members. Goal is to bring fashion and law (lawyers) together.
Fashion law is quite new, it deals for example with following legal questions: IPR (Intellectual Property Rights), privacy, marketing business, copying (how you can protect your products), technology, manufacturing, advertising (big area in fashion law world).
FFLA employees told how fashion law association will help designers how to create a company and what should take into consideration. It helps how to make contracts, product protections, marketing, also trademarks, copyrights, registrations questions etc. They also mentioned us some pretty interesting course (chargeable) where you will learn how to make webpages, connections to companies and people and how to build events.
FFLA find it very important to be aware about trademarks and logos and products (different enough compared to others on the market field), because now days brands are accurate when it comes to copying and mistakes can cost a lot (case Adidas vs West Coast).
Verneri Teppo, Ugné Bublaityté
