M
oominpappa and Moominmamma never worried
about money because, in Moominvalley, life is
about so much more than that. Yet the characters
first created by Tove Jansson in 1945 now help to
create rather a lot of it, making the Moomins one of
Finland’s less likely business success stories of the past decade.
Oy Moomin Characters Ltd, the company behind the brand, has
doubled in size in the past five years, growing for 60 consecutive
quarters. After 40 per cent growth in 2012, it currently pulls in
more than half a billion US dollars in retail sales. Finnish magazine
Talouselämä
has called it the country’s most cost-effective business.
Business has certainly changed since the 1950s, when Tove
Jansson and her brother Lars set up the Oy Moomin company to
deal with the requests that were flooding in to make Moomin dolls
and other products on the back of what was already becoming
one of Finland’s best-loved literary creations. The nine original
books and the comic strip that ran from 1954-1975 have now
been translated into 45 languages; Moomin animations have run
everywhere fromGermany to Poland, Japan and Russia; and the
brand extends from original songs to stage shows, a museum and
the Moomin World theme park in Naantali, near Turku.
The carefree and adventurous hippo-like creatures are so
ingrained in Finnish culture that former president Tarja Halonen
was nicknamed Moominmamma, not just because of the
Moominmamma bag she carried around – and yet it’s only been
in the last five years that the business success of the Moomins
has come close to matching their popularity. The turnaround has
been led by Lars’s daughter and Tove’s niece, Sophia Jansson, who
joined her family business in 1997 and took charge in 2005. In 2008
she employed managing director Roleff Kråkström, the former
marketing director at WSOY, Finland’s largest publisher, who set
about coming up with a plan for the brand.
“
We knew it needed to be more professional,” Sophia tells
me when we meet at Oy Moomin’s modest HQ on the Helsinki
waterfront, around a table spread with colourful sweets and
biscuits. “For a lot of the time the Moomins were being created,
Tove and Lars made the corrections themselves; they haggled with
publishers themselves. They were bad at saying no, but it was too
much for them, and everything was being managed by touch and
feel. In the long run, it wouldn’t have worked.”
When Sophia joined the company as director of artwork in
1997,
it was in the wake of a resurgence of a resurgence of interest
in the Moomins – what Finns call the
muumibuumi
(
Moomin
Boom) – prompted by a wildly popular 1990 animation that was
shown in 60 countries, as well as the opening of Moomin World
in 1993. Disney were interested in the brand, and its artwork was
“
I didn’t want to see these great works
turn into a cheap, nasty brand”
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