10-year anniversary history booklet

It all started with a gift

It all began in the run-up to Christmas 2015. Sonja was looking for a Christmas gift for me, and the idea was simple. It had to be something a bit more special—something you wouldn’t immediately run into on the street. It had to be made in Europe, and of such quality that it would stand up to years of hard daily use. Finding a product like that wasn’t quite easy, because in Finland the bigger stores were already chain stores back then, offering largely the same Far East production. In the end, Sonja found a brown weekender made in Italy online. When the parcel arrived, the brown turned out to be a little reddish. Still, it sparked an idea that stayed on my mind. Why couldn’t there be a small in the boutique in Finland that would curate high-quality products made only in Europe from small makers—products whose making we could go and see ourselves on site, and that we could also influence ourselves.

At Christmas 2015, we shared the idea with those close to us. The reception was doubtful. Will it work, don’t take the risk, you’ll lose all your money, and wouldn’t it be safer to just run a small online store from the basement. Only Sonja’s brother Samuli immediately thought we should try—because otherwise we’d regret it. It may also be that at that stage it was still hard for us to put into words what it was really about. For us, the idea was clear.

Starting the company

In early 2016, I wrote a business plan. It laid out what kind of selection we should have. All products had to relate in some way to a gentleman’s lifestyle and be timeless. Everything had to be made in Europe, and we didn’t want to carry products that were already otherwise sold in Finland or in some big online store. The plan also included calculations of what kind of turnover and margin the operation would require. The calculations were based on a study commissioned by the Mylly shopping centre on its own customer base. It included visitor numbers, average receipt values, annual sales and other things like that—an easy foundation to throw yourself into. Plans, however, are only ever good up until the moment the real work begins.

We started negotiating with the Mylly shopping centre about a retail space. At the same time, it became clear that the centre manager thought I was Sonja’s father—even though we have only a six-year age difference. I still haven’t recovered from that. We received an offer for a unit that also became our first boutique. The offer was somewhere between laughable and tear-inducing. I made a counteroffer that was one third of what was proposed, and a fixed term of two years instead of five. At the time, Mylly had plenty of empty retail units, and I knew there were no takers for them. The offer went through as-is, and later we negotiated the rent even lower. In the end, we practically paid only Mylly’s marketing fee, which I think was about half of the actual rent. For Mylly it was better to keep the space in use than empty—and we knew it.

The company hadn’t even been founded yet, because Sonja was applying for start-up grant funding. I think it was a few hundred euros a month for half a year. The company could not be founded before the application, because if it already existed, it was apparently considered to be able to manage anyway. The idea felt a bit odd to me. I didn’t really understand who would start a company whose survival depended on a few hundred euros a month. Processing the application took a long time. In the end we said we had to found the company the next day so we could sign contracts in the company’s name. After that, the application was approved immediately and Sonja received her start-up grant.

Financing

The money needed to set up the boutique came from the two of us. We didn’t take out any loan. Sonja had sold her house in Ulvila in summer 2015 and moved in with me, so after the mortgage there was a little money left from the house. I, in turn, had quit an IT consultancy and sold my stake in it. There was a bit more left from that. When we put these together, we covered the set-up costs and the first initial stock. Looking back, we can say we had an unbelievable lack of money. You could see it right away at the beginning, when there were only a handful of products on the shelves.

We saved money all the time by doing everything ourselves, and the same idea still holds. The store was furnished largely with IKEA furniture. I designed and assembled the clothing rails out of water pipes. Samuli installed the laminate floor in the shop. I figured out and set up the POS system, inventory management, and other necessary IT. At first we didn’t even have an online store, but we realised fairly quickly that we needed to invest in it. Sonja handled the store’s visual merchandising and styling, ordered the products, set the prices, designed the Saarni logo, and came up with the name too.

It’s probably good to say out loud that we had no real experience in the industry. Sonja had worked in marketing at an automotive parts store. I was a business director in IT. Sonja had some entrepreneurial experience from a sole proprietorship; I didn’t even have that. We understood almost nothing about clothes and weren’t particularly initiated into the subject. If someone came to tell me now that they were going to become an entrepreneur with exactly the same tools, I would probably say the same as our close circle did back then: Don’t do it.

Money was always tight. We didn’t have money to pay a salary, so Sonja worked unpaid by keeping the boutique open whenever Mylly was open—that is, over 70 hours a week. I helped alongside my own work as much as I could. At home we lived off my income, because there practically wasn’t any other. Any spare money went into growing the stock and acquiring new products. Every wrong purchase was expensive. If a product didn’t sell, the money sat on the shelf exactly when it was needed most.

There were expensive mistakes too. One English shoe manufacturer was caught making some of its shoes in India and didn’t want to say which models those were. We had no choice but to tell customers what had happened and sell the whole batch at half price. We stuck to our principles. Another costly lesson came when a manufacturer couldn’t arrange transport for a small box of T-shirts. I called one of the carriers and ordered transport from Italy to Finland without asking further about the price. The package arrived, and then the invoice arrived. It was €465. Those are the most expensive T-shirts ever.

The city centre opens

When the company was founded, the idea was to grow this into a chain that would someday be sold—and we’d laugh all the way to the bank. So in 2017 we opened a second boutique in Turku city centre on Kauppiaskatu, at its current location. Again, we did everything ourselves. The same clothes rails built from water pipes are still in use there. In hindsight, it was absolutely the right decision to open the first store in Mylly, because we immediately got visibility thanks to the high footfall. If we had first opened on Kauppiaskatu, the visibility would have been considerably lower.

Opening on Kauppiaskatu didn’t require loan money either. The financing was scraped together largely by working ourselves, unpaid. By this point, however, there was already enough activity that we could hire people, and Sonja wouldn’t have been able to keep two stores open alone anyway. The city-centre customer base was different from Mylly’s. We often noticed that a product was in the wrong in the boutique at exactly the moment a customer would have needed it in the other one. We were constantly hauling goods between the two stores.

Expansion to Helsinki

A couple of years later, in 2019, a third store was opened in Helsinki on Annankatu. The space was great, and we were able to hire a good person to work there. Helsinki was the first boutique for which we took out a loan. It wasn’t a lot—if I remember correctly, about fifty thousand euros—but for us it was a big thing in principle. Up to that point we had been debt-free.

It became clear fairly quickly that running three boutiques meant, in practice, spending workdays on wheels. Sonja drove back and forth between Turku and Helsinki, keeping the stores open and moving goods from one place to another. At the same time, the POS, inventory, and online store system we were using began to show its limits when it was supposed to understand the business of three different locations. Sonja’s work gradually started shifting more towards marketing, the online store, social media, and product descriptions. Counter shifts began to become rarer. I, in turn, had bought into a clothing factory called Tam-Silk in Kangasala with a group, and I was completely tied up with that.

Corona

In spring 2020, Sonja and I had booked a trip to Italy. We used to go there at least twice a year to meet manufacturers—one trip in spring and another in autumn, sometimes a third in between. The trip planned for March took a strange turn, however, when a message came from Italy saying that one town we were going to was closed because of corona. We changed our travel plan, until we received a message that the outbound flight had been cancelled. We took a new flight via Central Europe, but soon that was cancelled too. In the end, hotels started informing us one by one that they couldn’t host us, and the whole trip was cancelled.

In spring, trading practically died. The online store brought in some sales, but nowhere near enough. It was clear the company wouldn’t survive long with three stores in that situation. We made the decision to close all other boutiques except Kauppiaskatu. All employees were furloughed, and we had to lay people off. Later Amanda returned to work, then Katlin, and they are still with us.

We carried the goods from Mylly to Kauppiaskatu and informed the shopping centre that the boutique would be closed. We didn’t have a valid lease agreement, because S Group had forgotten to renew it, so we simply carried the goods out and that was that. The Helsinki store hadn’t even been open for a year when it was cleared out and the goods were taken to Turku. I think a tear or two did fall when the boutiques we’d built with hard work were shut down. The loan for the Helsinki boutique was still practically entirely unpaid.

Good fortune

During corona, the government distributed support via Business Finland, which I applied for both Saarni and Tam-Silk. We received full corona support for both. In addition, it helped us that when three stores merged into one, we suddenly had goods to sell for a long time. We didn’t need to rush into making new purchases right away.

Perhaps the smartest decision at that stage, however, was that we decided to use the quiet period to renew our systems. We started a project where all products were moved—with their images and information—to a new platform that functions as POS, inventory, and online store. Sonja did an enormous amount of work in this system renewal. It also helped that the same system change had been done at Tam-Silk, so I was able to help with many technical issues that came up during the update.

Change of strategy

Once we had made it through corona and Tam-Silk became history for my part, it was time to rethink Saarni. We had come to the conclusion that building a chain might not, after all, be what we want to do. Running multiple boutiques brought a logistical nightmare, a lot of costs, and a lot of risk. We decided that going forward we would focus on the online store and the Kauppiaskatu boutique—while also accepting that we might never sell any Saarni chain and laugh all the way to the bank.

Since then, sales have grown steadily. Turnover quickly grew beyond the combined turnover of the three stores. Every post-corona year has been better than the previous one—as were the years before it. All of these ten years have been profitable for us, which has always been important. Profits have been put back into the business, and that has shown in the following years as better turnover and operating profit.

In 2025 we also tried to see whether the online store could bring in more sales abroad. I created language versions for the site using an AI application. We had received orders from abroad even before, even though the site was only in Finnish. Now we tried targeted advertising in a few EU countries, and the end result was that we burned practically as much money on marketing as we brought in sales. International sales increased a little over twofold, but it wasn’t financially worthwhile.

Related to this international push, I have to tell one more story. In the run-up to Christmas I made ads for Sweden, always setting some €5–€15 daily budget. I scheduled the ads to run for a few days—except for one time. One ad was missing the end date entirely. In May, Sonja noticed that we still had a Christmas ad running in Sweden, with some messenger in the middle of Christmas baubles, and it had been running for half a year. It cost over five thousand euros. And it definitely wasn’t profitable.

Friends and help

Right at the start we got Reykjavik District as a supplier, which is Olly Lindal’s clothing brand. Olly is from Iceland, but lives and works in Warsaw. He has a small workshop where the clothes are made mainly from Italian fabrics. From the very beginning, Olly was a big help to us—not only as a supplier but also in many other ways. He advised us, for example, on how to decorate the boutique, what services to offer, and what things to pay attention to in clothing. Olly already had over 20 years of experience in the industry back then, so his help was invaluable. We often visited Warsaw to see Olly and his family, and of course to visit the Reykjavik District store at the same time.

Opposite the Mylly store, there was a small women’s boutique run by Virpi. She put in long days for her own business, and she was a great support to Sonja when the hours in the boutique felt heavy. Samuli helped at the beginning with product images and descriptions. I served as the model, because handsome men weren’t available. Samuli is a professional photographer, and he helped Sonja develop into the photographer she has since become. Today, all the boutique’s photos—from product shots onwards—are taken by Sonja, except for the ones where I’m still the model.

We also got help with the money situation at the beginning. My father bought 15 percent of the company at a very early stage, and with that money we were able to grow the stock. Later those shares were bought back by the company with interest, and today Sonja and I are the only owners.

When we opened a store in the city centre, next door there was Araminta, a women’s clothing shop run by Irma and Oral. They became not only friends but also pillars of support for us. They had entrepreneurial experience going back to the early 1980s, so they had seen the devaluation of the markka, several recessions, and the arrival of the euro. Together we then also experienced corona, the exterior façade renovation on Kauppiaskatu, and street works. Irma and Oral have since retired—well deservedly—and Araminta is no longer our neighbour.

How we divide the work

These days the work is divided so that Sonja is responsible for the entire business—especially marketing, manufacturers, and all kinds of day-to-day matters. She shoots daily in the small studio we built in the basement on Kauppiaskatu. Sonja creates all social media posts and basically everything that’s visible to the outside world.

Amanda and Sonja place orders together. They look at fabrics, buttons, leathers, colours, quantities, and sometimes also whether this soap smells better than that one. Of course, others are involved too. Sonja and I still go to Italy to place orders and get to know new manufacturers. On trips, Sonja chats with Amanda on WhatsApp about the selection, and I try on clothes and shoes as a fit model, because I’m this standard-measurement M size mannequin.

Katlin handles sales in our store and also takes part in developing the product range based on customer feedback. She takes care of online store customer service and order processing, and has started actively developing the online store together with Sonja. Saara is the newest addition and, as a student, helps out from time to time during busy periods and to cover for illnesses.

I handle our Google advertising and also help Sonja with Meta ads. I’m also responsible for the company’s finances. I used to make budgets for us, but we’ve since abandoned them. So we don’t have a formal budget at all, even though we do of course keep an eye on the finances all the time. Otherwise I’m a bit of a general handyman. If something needs fixing in the shop, or the IT doesn’t work, I rush in. Still, my most important job is being Sonja’s driver in Italy.

Working with manufacturers

We have manufacturers from several countries, but by far the most from Italy. After Brexit, there have been moderate problems with products coming from England, so the importance of the EU has become very concrete. Working with Italians and other nationalities can be challenging at times, but I don’t see it as a cultural thing. It’s usually about what kind of person you happen to be dealing with. We’ve stopped working with some suppliers simply because there have been too many difficulties. With a few, we’ve sometimes been quite desperate, but in the end things have been put right. We haven’t experienced outright scams. Once, though, we were sent completely different size options than what we had agreed and paid for on site. It was the first, last, and only time we worked with them.

In practice, the process goes like this: Sonja and I go to the manufacturer’s fabric or leather stockroom, where there are shelves full of bolts. From those, we choose what will be made into what. For shoes and bags, we select leathers and designs we consider good. For clothing, suitable fabrics, buttons, and other details. Of course, we can’t just choose fabrics ourselves like that—we always need a professional to tell us what can be made from each fabric. Many manufacturers also send swatches and, for example, buttons to the boutique so orders can be placed remotely. Based on pictures alone, for example, you can’t really see what kind of product a fabric will ultimately become. Even now, it’s exciting to open the boxes and see what the finished product looks like. Sometimes there are misses, even despite the swatches.

We also never design garments or shoes entirely from scratch—the base patterns are always the manufacturer’s own. With this background you can do many things, but fashion design is truly professionals’ work. We can say what we want changed, what kinds of fabrics and details are needed, or whether the sleeve should be narrowed, but we can’t design them completely ourselves. With shoes too, we modify an existing model rather than designing an entirely new shoe. The end result, however, is that these are clothes, shoes, and other products that have been made exclusively for us.

The future

At the moment, Sonja and I have been talking a lot about what we want from Saarni going forward. We’ve come to the conclusion that the limits of growth may have been reached, because the current premises simply can’t fit more. Next door there’s an empty unit, but it has a different landlord, so combining the spaces isn’t possible. It could perhaps be rented as storage only, but the rent demand is so high that the space will probably stay empty for a long time. One option would be to move elsewhere, but that carries a big risk—and perhaps, quite simply, we just like the current space. A small, intimate space gives exactly the kind of boutique feel we want. We would only need more storage, and you can’t get that in this space.

In addition, in 2024 we had a daughter, Vesta, which changed things in the sense that it would be nice to do something other than work sometimes in life. This applies especially to Sonja, whose way of working has always been 110 percent. Now, because of Vesta, Sonja works a four-day week, and that is more valuable to us than turnover or operating profit.

24.3.2026
Tuomo Saarni

P.S. Below are photos from along the way, and the photos include a short write-up about what they are about.