My Favorite Things skate shop (2014-)

In the summer of 2013 I took a road trip through Finland all the way to Lapland’s capital city Rovaniemi. It was there where I hang out with Tuomas Uusipulkamo, Wu-Tom, who I had known for few years already from sponsoring him with Nike SB and Happy Hour Skateboards.

During my visit to Rovaniemi, Wu mentioned about his dreams to move to Helsinki and wanting to work in skate industry in our capital.

Wu-Tom in Rovaniemi. Flexing with the matching Mighty Ducks towels. 2013

We had long conversations about the status of skate shops in Helsinki at that time. All the skater owned brick & mortar shops like Grey Market Supply and Cali Helsinki (R.I.P. to both) had gone bankrupt, and we had nothing else but shopping mall skate shops left, who at that time weren’t focusing much on getting good skate hardware products in as skateboarding wasn’t commercially big at that time.

Couple examples of this - if you were a skateboarder in Helsinki in 2013 looking for a size 8,25” board from DLXSF brands (Anti Hero, Real etc.), there could be months in between deliveries where a single shop didn’t have any left. There wasn’t longevity in skateboard offering in these mall shops, that was a big problem for local skateboarders if there was a particular board you were preferring to ride. To me what’s even worse was that at some point, there was months that none of the shops in Helsinki were willing to stock up on Happy Hour Skateboards decks even though they had sold them all out. I had been helping our local brand Happy Hour with sales since 2012 with Four Down Distribution, and it was shocking to me to see the lack of support some Helsinki shops had for our products. The demand was definitely there and we got dozens of requests from Helsinki skateboarders to buy Happy Hour boards, but some of the shop owners didn’t think at the time that it’d be important to support the local skate brands.

All of these small things combined, we saw that there could be a need for a different approach, something actually from skateboarders to skateboarders, with a heavy focus on skate hardware.

After I came back to Helsinki from that up north road trip, we started to do plans about what it’d take to open up a skate shop, and once we actually decided to do it together, the rumors started to quickly spread amongst our close friends.

My ex room mate from Helsinki, Tuomas “Tume” Nyyssönen saw me at some party few weeks after and he asked me about our plans with Wu-Tom. I told him about our vision and Tume wanted to join our crew as a part owner. He already had a day job at Kontula indoor skate park in Helsinki and I had my Nike SB agency & Four Down Distribution running in full effect, so the plan was to get Wu-Tom hired to run a shop, and our roles would be divided in the background.

Tume, me & Wu-Tom. Café Balzac, Spring 2014. Our first meeting together where we made the final decision to open up a skate shop.

The location was the easiest part. I already had a cool unique retail space in southern Helsinki’s Punavuori district in Fredrikinkatu 31 courtyard, that had been a Nike SB / Nike Sportswear showroom for few years prior.

Nike Sportswear’s sales & customer service was switching over to Sweden, and I knew I could sell Nike SB category from somewhere else, I didn’t need all the square meters we had in Fredrikinkatu for it. I knew that the showroom space I had in Fredrikinkatu 31 was meant to be a skate shop at some point. It just had that vibe.

After getting the bank loans, the loan guarantees and going through all the bureaucracy, we spent the summer 2014 finishing up everything for our opening.

The only “vacation” we had was to fly out to Bright trade show in Berlin to meet up with some European agents and distributors to secure couple crucially important brands for our offering.

Beer-o-clock at Bright trade show Berlin with Eniz Fazliov, Summer 2014. Eniz joined MFT’s skate team five years after in 2019.

Some of the brands we got covered from that trip like FA are still our shop’s top brands today.

The last weeks before the opening were full chaos. There were some companies who wouldn’t ship us product as our VAT number wasn’t active because of summer holidays at government offices. Our sales register (to be synchronized with our online shop later on) was a test project for a coding company who was mostly experienced in online booking systems earlier. It was a cheap solution that was working quite well for us for years to come, but it needed a lot of work in the beginning. There was so much to do, and the summer was almost over.

Wu-Tom gazing at the just installed +6 meter board wall. This was only few days before the shop’s opening.

We opened My Favorite Things in August 21st 2014.

Skate team announcement. Our box logo & visual identity is designed by Janne-Juhani Hyvärinen. These Instagram launch photos were designed by our team rider Juha Pönkänen.

There was literally a packed courtyard in our opening party, hundreds of people came in to check the shop and party with us. On that first night we realized we had created something for the culture, something that was missing from the skateboard scene in Helsinki at that time.

My Favorite Things opening day, 21st of August 2014

My Favorite Things opening night, 21st of August 2014

One of the first customers on our opening day was a DJ friend of mine, Markus Karlqvist. He bought a MFT logo shirt and asked where the name of the shop comes from.

We told him we loved John Coltrane’s version of the song My Favorite Things (originally from the musical Sound of Music) and he showed us his John Coltrane tattoo.

This is a sight i’ll never forget. from that point I knew that the special name for the shop was a good pick.

A Love Supreme

About the name My Favorite Things, we wanted to capture our love for our golden era of skateboarding, ranging from late 1990s to early 00s. All three of us loved Jahmal Williams’ part in the skate movie dNA Continuum, at least for me that was the skate part that introduced John Coltrane’s version of My Favorite Things to me. The name and the vibes were timeless, and that’s what we aimed for with our shop as well.

Speaking of timelessness, for our logo, we wanted it to have same kind of vibe the Blue Note records had with their jazz record covers. Design wise they stand time no matter where design trends come and go. We aimed for the same.

My Favorite Things logo design by Janne-Juhani Hyvärinen

Hang Up Magazine 3 / 2014

Hang Up Magazine 3 / 2014

To be fully honest, I have to say our timing was the worst possible to open up a skate shop. First of all, don’t ever open up a skate shop for Fall season here up north. The yearly sales heavily rely on outdoor season from April to late September, so opening up in August isn’t a good choice.

Also, in 2013 everyone, I mean everyone were wearing Nike SB Janoski’s. It was clearly the #1 skate shoe at the time, and non-skaters wore it as they were a cool hybrid of a vulcanized skate shoe and a deck shoe. It worked perfect with slim jeans that were trendy back then. Janoski shoe had been clearly the top seller in all skate shops around the world for 3 years already.

Stefan Janoski with a Janoski wagon

By summer 2014, the shoe trend was suddenly changing, but our business model we had planned few months earlier was based on monthly “no-brainer” sales of Janoskis. In August 2014 the Janoski trend was dying in Helsinki so we really quickly had to figure out where could we make money to survive.

On top of that, skateboarding definitely wasn’t a huge trend in Finland in 2014. Skate parks were filled with “scooters” that young kids were super into.

Against all odds we still did it, and decided to not to compromise from our idea of a true and real skate shop.

The first winter was approaching quickly, so we were working hard day and night to get our online shop opened before the end of the outdoor skate season.

We managed to go live with www.myfavoritethings.fi on 8th of November 2014, and to be honest that saved us from the start.

I mean the online business certainly wasn’t huge at first, but every order counted. This was the era not all stores even had online shops, so luckily we were wise enough to think that it’s a must to have online business open as soon as possible after the opening. Also our inventory was built to sync in real time with the online shop so it made running the online business smooth from the start. We wouldn’t had survived our first winter without online sales.

For the years 2014-2016 at MFT I say this. If you manage to pay no attention to naysayers and are willing to work 7 days a week if needed, everything is possible, but it definitely won’t be easy physically or mentally.

We didn’t have external funding at any point, it’s something that could’ve definitely made many things easier for us on our first years, but with hard work and will, we somehow were able to survive from those crucial first years.

From the bottom of my heart I want to thank our customers who made it possible. Like I said, every order meant a lot for our future. Also we had several helping hands to support us on our daily operations. Thanks to all.

For me personally, I had to put almost everything else in my life aside for a while around 2015-2016. It’s a bit heavy to write about this, I wish no entrepreneurs ever would have to cut from their personal life to make their business continue, but unfortunately it’s more than common.

The future of My Favorite Things was my top priority, and even though I lost connect to some of my friends around that time because I didn’t have the energy to keep all of my social contacts, or have energy to many hobbies outside my work life, I haven’t regretted it ever after. It was a tough choice, but I felt I had no other choice. I didn’t want our journey with MFT to end in just couple years. Yes, we went through hell, but we survived.

In 2017 things started to slowly look a bit better for us. In couple years we were experienced enough as retailers to deep dive into our strengths and weaknesses, how to optimize our buying, how to make our marketing better, and slowly we steered the ship towards a better future.

Around that time Miikka Viljanen, who had worked several years in skate business in Finland, joined our forces and hopped straight to the role of part owner and CEO.

Janne-Juhani Hyvärinen was the mastermind behind many succesful MFT campaigns, including this Gucci Mane Wedding sale weekend.

My Favorite Things was starting to get acknowledged as the skate shop with the best selection of brands and the best customer service in Helsinki.

By 2017 we had already at that point imported over 15 brands that hadn’t been available ever before in Finland. Brands like FA, Hockey, Dime, Odd Future, Bronze 56k, Quartersnacks & Call Me 917.

As our brand selection was really strong from the start, after a year or two some cool brands started to contact us directly. The word about us was out there internationally, and we were starting to get recognized as a key skate door for northern European marketplace. That helped a lot for us, and most importantly it helped us to realize that what we were doing was important not only for local customers and fans, but also for the international brands we worked with.

Flyer for MFT xmas party at We Got Beef, December 2016. Design by Janne-Juhani Hyvärinen

2019 was a big year for us, as we’d had growth in 2018, we were at a point that we had the guts to launch a completely new online shop fine tuned for our needs and to automate a lot of things that were taking too much time to do manually in our daily operations.

By opening this new online shop, it sparked our online sales to a new level. Still today, looking at cost vs. result I’d say it’d be almost impossible to get as good online shop with the same budget we had for it.

It took a lot of time from our end to optimize the shop and to try to cut down things that could’ve doubled or tripled the cost of launching the online shop, but it was 100% worth the effort.

Around that time we were getting ranked really high in international shop tiering. For some brands we’re in their top 20 skate doors globally, and every other shop in those lists are names we always have really looked up to. Shops like Civilist in Berlin, Germany, Ben G in Amsterdam, Netherlands and Mortar in Tokyo, Japan were on those same lists with MFT.

Miikka, Tume and me & Hang Up Magazine’s skate shop of the year award which we have won almost every year the awards have been organized.

Another year, another round of Hang Up Magazine awards. Tume, me and Miikka.

Eniz Fazliov joined our team in August 2019. Photo by Justus Hirvi

Eniz’s Free Skateboard Mag part premiere at MFT, 2019

Also, skateboarding was starting to definitely grow in Helsinki and in Finland in the summer of 2019. For the first time we got the feeling that after all of these years, the decision to focus strongly on skate brands and hardware especially was worth it financially too. Boards started to fly out of our walls.

To this date we have the biggest hardware offering vs. the total shop square meters compared to majority of skate shops globally. This is something I’m really proud to say. Even though financially many other solutions would’ve been wiser, we never sacrificed from our prime focuses.

Our board wall from 2017, already before the current skateboarding trend

In 2020 the whole world changed, and so did MFT.

When COVID hit, of course everything was a mess, but we made our best effort to change our ways of doing customer service.

We fine tuned some things on our online shop and started to do door-to-door deliveries with our newly acquired Christiania Bike.

The “MFT bike”

For the first time in MFT’s history we also had something super trendy, Nike SB Dunks.

The funny thing is, which kids tend to forget about, is that we have had Nike SB Dunks in our shelf since the day we opened in 2014. It wasn’t anything new to us.

My Favorite Things has never been about chasing trends. We stick to our vision, and sometimes some of our “favorite things” become trendy for the masses, sometimes they don’t. We don’t chase the money or clout. Our brand’s vision has always been clear to us.

Trends come and go quicker than ever thanks to Instagram and Tiktok, but I have to tell something about the Dunks to give perspective.

In 2016, we had to sell most of our pairs of De La Soul Dunk SB Highs and Lows for -60% discount (roughly 45 euros a pair) at MFT, as no-one cared about the Dunks. In 2022 the Low versions go for close to 500€ in resell market, the “hype trends” have definitely changed. It’s still the same product, it wasn’t looking worse at all in 2016 compared to 2022.

From 2014 to 2018 many skate shops even stopped to sell the SB Dunk even though it was available for every season. There were very few skaters who preferred the model for skating, and even less “sneaker heads” who’d be into rocking a pair of Dunks, high or low. Bulky retro basketball cupsole shoes just weren’t the thing. Many skate shops switched their footwear offering to non-skate collections, particularly Adidas NMD’s and Ultra Boosts. For skateboard shoes, it was a sad time. Even though it would’ve been an easy money maker for MFT to hop on the Adidas Originals trend wave, we made the decision to keep it real and stick to the styles we actually cared about, what MFT was about.

Here’s the problem on styles like NMD and Ultra Boost. Both of these trend waves were based on styles that had very little history behind the brand. They were almost completely new silhouettes with some small details here and there taken from Adidas archives. The problem is, when the trend wave passes, the business will die overnight with these new models, with a risk of even ruining the brand’s overall image at the same time if you can find these styles for heavy discounts everywhere.

The difference with Nike Dunk for example is that the Dunk is an iconic product, originating to 1985, and it’s always been treated as an iconic product by the brand. To not to supply over demand ever. If the Dunk becomes trendy, Nike will allocate the quantities to control the volumes.

From style point of view, of course trend waves come and go and change the overall business on styles like the Dunk, but basically iconic products never go out of style. Same can be said about a pair of Clark’s Wallabees, Levi’s 501’s or New Balance 990’s, as long as the quality is there and the icon is treated as an icon by the brand, it’s always stylish no matter where the current trend waves are going.

This is how you treat an iconic product. All credit to New Balance for this one.

Unfortunately many people don’t see the big picture, and think only the current trend is cool to wear, which leads to footwear sales leaning too much on certain models that are hot at the time. I wish more people would boldly wear whatever they are into, and follow less what the hottest rapper at the time is wearing on his/her latest Instagram post. We are living in a world where this is how trends come and go though, and kids pretty much pay anything to get the same shoes and the same jackets their idols are wearing, no matter how expensive they are. Also, they ditch the old trends and hop on new waves faster than ever before.

You can’t buy style with money though.

Speaking of rappers, as Nike SB released their Travis Scott Dunk Low on late February 2020, just couple weeks before COVID hit big time in Finland, from the 1,5 block long queue we had for our instore release, we knew that the SB Dunk trend was here to stay for a while.

Travis Scott Dunk SB queue in -20c weather. Photo found on Facebook, photo credits missing.

Helsingin Sanomat, February 29th 2020

So thanks to Nike SB, and Dunk particularly, that kept us busy for 2020.

Also skateboarding boomed big time, so our hardware sales were skyrocketing.

As gyms and indoor sport arenas were closing because of COVID and spring time came, a lot of people were searching for outdoor hobbies which could be done outdoors, with keeping the distance to others. It was amazing that a lot of people found skateboarding in 2020, and luckily hundreds of new skateboarders found MFT as well. I’m sure all skate shops got their share of this skateboarding boom.

In 2021 our shop was starting to look a little bit too crusty in our eyes. The store had looked pretty much the same since 2014 and we felt it was looking quite outdated. With a good year behind us, we decided to do a complete renovation of our brick & mortar shop at Fredrikinkatu 31.

With the help of the really talented and all around nice guy Tuomo Järvi, “MFT 2.0” was built in few weeks in February 2021.

Our professional painter Eniz, mastermind Tuomo in the middle & CEO Miikka. February 2021

Planning the new MFT together with Tuomo was amazing, he brought in some fresh vision outside from skate world, and we made sure to keep some important elements of the old shop to be updated to this new one. As we like to call it, “MFT 2.0”, opened it’s doors in Fredrikinkatu 31 courtyard on 27th of February 2021.

photo by Samuli Vienola

Photo by Samuli Vienola

Me and Miikka analyzing Norppa’s griptape skills. Photo by Samuli Vienola

Every industry and every business will have their own story about COVID time, for skateboard business one of the biggest challenge has been trying to find a balance of supply and demand, and to get products delivered when they’re most needed.

For past two years all production and deliveries have been in a whirlwind, and I’m predicting it’ll be the same at least for 2022.

A good example is skateboard wheels. The wheels need the urethane pouring, and little did I know these same factories who do wheels, do a lot of production with other plastic products as well. Even though urethane is considered more as a rubber than plastic, it’s a “plastic product” of sorts anyway.

Many of these factories have used their resources past two years to produce vaccination tubes, home tests etc. So as long as we have this pandemic going on, for wheel deliveries everything will be a mess. This is just a small example of many things that have many unexpected factors when it comes to production.

In 2022 I love the direction where our shop is going, even though there’s a lot of questions in the air where the whole industry heading to.

We have the strongest staff we have ever had before, we have some positive new changes coming soon which I can’t tell about yet, and despite the occasional extra stress factors the pandemic gives us, I’ve never felt more confident in what we do.

We’re 7,5 years strong now, and I fully believe we’re gonna celebrate our 10 year anniversary in 2024.

Norppa & Peik shipping orders, summer 2021. Photo by Samuli Vienola

By opening up oyo workshop, i’ll step down a bit from my role at MFT and give more space for our staff to do things their way, and lead us to the future.

I’m not going anywhere, I’ll still be around a lot and help where my help is needed and I continue as a part owner of MFT.

I just feel I can give a bit more to MFT from the background instead being involved in our every day operations.

I’m dedicating this post to all of our customers who have supported us from August 2014 to today. Without you we wouldn’t be here doing what we love and care about.

A biggest thank you to my colleagues Miikka and Tume, and our staff Wu-Tom and Norppa. I love the energy we have. Thank you to all who have worked for us short or long term earlier in MFT’s history.

And last but not least a huge thank you to MFT’s skate team & extended family. You guys are the soul of our shop.

Thank you for trusting us.

Thanks for tuning in,

-Oki