The plight of the Finnish clothing business has been making headlines. Everyone's story seems to follow roughly the same arc: at first everything goes well and orders come flooding in from every direction, but then the engine splutters and things start to slow down. Nobody reacts to the slowdown quickly enough and the problems start piling up. The losses mount, then come the sales, the funding rounds and finally the shutters come down for good. That's what happened to Papu last autumn.
I've been in the clothing industry for around ten years now. First my wife and I founded Saarni - Gentlemen's Boutique here in the Turku area, then in 2018 I was involved in buying Tam-Silk, which I left at the start of 2021. Along the way there have been a few other, smaller clothing companies too, which ended in a crash landing. A few things have stuck with me most from these 10 years, and I thought I'd share them.
THREE LESSONS
The first is that there's always something to worry about. The bricks-and-mortar shop is either having its façade renovated, stuck behind roadworks or there's water damage downstairs. If you sell wool-silk long johns, you might be hit by a winter that never arrives, or production might grind to a halt because of one unlucky batch of yarn. A global pandemic might come along and make the big retail groups cancel their orders, binding though they are, and there you are fuming with nothing you can do about it. The only certainty is that there's always something to worry about; the worries just come in different sizes. Life as an entrepreneur is about learning to live with worries of all sizes and solving them.
The second lesson is that it's always down to you. If winter never arrives and sales slump, it's down to how well you prepared if you can't come up with something else to sell. If your shop disappears behind a tramline construction site, your online shop had better be up to scratch. If there's a global pandemic, you can always sell fabric face masks. The easiest thing of all is to blame outside factors, but that's just making excuses and refusing to own your mistakes.
The third lesson is that in a shrinking market, someone is always growing. Even though everyone here talks about the clothing industry being in dire straits, nobody points out that we have clothing companies that are growing and doing well. As good examples, I'd like to mention Alpa, Toive and Nakoa, which are not only growing but doing so profitably. I'm sure there are others too.
PAPU'S FUTURE
Papu has only been up and running for four months, and of course these things never go entirely to plan. The point of a plan is to think about the future, and the point of the future is then to make the plans look ridiculous.
In our plans, sales were significantly better than they've actually turned out, but they haven't been a disaster either. Sales have clearly picked up now in May, since we got colourful summer products such as the Paris Stripes and the summer cotton knits. We got going with products that had been intended for last autumn, before the bankruptcy, and autumn products are hard to sell in February. You bought them all the same, and thank you for that.
We're a very small team, so everyone has their sleeves rolled up. Jussi handles customer service, while Anna takes care of social media and collaborations and helps our designers Pauliina and Annmari build the collection for autumn. Annmari also looks after production, which means keeping the clothing factories in Portugal and the Baltics in check. My own time goes on running the digital marketing, running the finances and sorting out all sorts of admin. By the way, I'm the only one of us doing this full-time, so it's not as if there are five of us on the payroll, which would be quite an expense. I have great faith in this bunch and in our people's skills and attitude. My own skills could always be better, of course, but luckily I have foolhardy courage to spare.
So Papu's future is still fairly hazy, because everything is still at such an early stage. There are more positive signs than negative ones, and it always comes down to how well we can generate sales. And sales only come from making good, high-quality, interesting products, so that's down to us. We then back that up by making ourselves known through marketing and, for instance, by writing newsletters like this one.
The upcoming autumn collection is the first one designed entirely by the new team, and we believe in its success 110%.
THE FUTURE OF THE CLOTHING INDUSTRY
The clothing industry isn't going anywhere in Finland, quite the opposite. I believe, and hope, that we'll see more Finnish companies growing and succeeding. After all, Finland has a sizeable clothing market with room for plenty of players. I also hope we'll see Finnish clothing brands working together to boost visibility and sales, because every euro spent on clothing that stays in Finland is a shared win for all of us.
-Tuomo Saarni, CEO of Papu
PS. This post was originally published in our newsletter on 29 May 2026
