After being featured in Dwell we thought it would be fun to re-introduce ourselves. We’ve met a lot of new people in the store and one thing we heard over and over was that the photos they saw didn’t really reflect the true scale of the store, or the range of work we sell.

We thought this would be a great time to share some updated photos, and also share a more in depth experience of the new online store.

A new shot of the front half of the store, the white risers are lined in one row showcasing more of our artisan products.

New coffee scoops by Japanese artist Tomiyama Koichi, soon to be added to the online store.

A photo of our store’s functioning kitchen, complete with a teak counter top and blue Vola faucet by Arne Jacobsen. We empty this counter during events, it’s the perfect place to rest your drink.

The back of the showroom with our newest cabinetry addition, designed by Studio Junction. This is where we feature our more personal accessories including magnetic business card cases by Masakage Tanno, leather works by Kenton Sorensen, and our new perfume created by Comme Des Garcons for Artek.

The Japanese coffee light is by the same artist who makes the coffee scoops, it features a handmade walnut lamp shade.

Trinidad chairs and Hiroshima dining table in front of our oak and glass shoji inspired sliding door. Our furniture offerings are a bit sparse at the moment but all that will change by the end of the month when Fredericia and Asplund arrive!

So if you came to our shop and purchased something, you’d be taking it home in our little brown paper bags with a sticker enclosure.

We spent a lot of time thinking about how we could bring the experience of the brick and mortar shop to our online customers. We started with the idea of printing boxes, and came up with the idea of creating a wire cage milk bottle crate image on the box. Once we had the milk theme down it was easy, for the small box we would have a milk pitcher inspired by our favourite milk pitcher by Kaj Franck for Arabia, and the largest box we would have a large milk pail.

We took our initial ideas and mock ups and gave them to Sali Tabacchi to be refined. They took our simple drawings and took them to the next level, giving them life and movement, the upside down bottles, stacked milk pitchers, and the return address foil stamp – all their ideas.

So when ordering from us, how would we wrap up the following:

Kenton Sorensen passport wallet
Nendo Corona mini globe
Mjölk tea towel

The wallet we would wrap in some beautiful wax paper, we’re using this paper for our brushes, leather products, and small woodware.

The Corona globe comes in a simple box so we wrap it in some additional brown paper, tag it with our mjölk sticker and tie it with natural twine.

The tea towel is simply wrapped in white tissue paper and closed with a sticker.

Now if you’ve purchase from us before these boxes you might say “Hey! I just purchased from you guys and the packaging wasn’t this nice!” That might be true since if the box is really beautiful, or if the item is a hard shape to wrap we might have simply wrapped it in some simple tissue paper. Now that we have the new boxes we’re going to try our best to stick to this caliber of packaging, hopefully we’ll find even more inspiration during our next trip to Japan.

The stickers are designed to be both right side and upside down because we use them as a close on our store paper bags. We also include hand written notes with our orders on over sized business cards.

Ps. We re-use clean bubble wrap, packing peanuts and any other crazy materials to fill these boxes out. Reduce, reuse, recycle!

We hope everyone is having a fantastic summer! We’ve been very busy but not too busy to share our new tea towels with you. We feel especially close to the people we’ve been working with, who have grown along with us since opening our store. Kauniste produces our favorite tea towels, and the moment we received our first shipment we knew we wanted to collaborate with them some how.

It was a few orders later that we asked them if we could work together to produce a Mjölk (milk) themed tea towel, and in the beginning it just didn’t seem like time could permit the project, between the two of us growing our businesses we just didn’t know if the idea would get off the ground. It wasn’t until our trip to Helsinki that Milla and Hiro surprised us with some milk inspired illustrations by Maria Tolvanen. We were thrilled they had pocketed our idea and had taken it to the next level of getting ideas on paper. Over the next month we worked with Milla, Hiro, and Maria tweaking some of the design and we couldn’t be happier with the result.

The tea towels are available in three different colours and feature some of our favorite things including a few nods to classic Finnish design. Can you spot them?

To celebrate receiving the tea towels we thought it would be nice to do a free giveaway! All you need to do is leave a comment, we’d love to know what you think of the towels and which colour you like best!

Sorry, the contest is over…

Have you read the newest issue of Dwell yet?

We’re thrilled to be included in the new September issue. We’ve both been avid readers of Dwell for years and our collection of Dwell is cataloged in our bookcase, it’s the type of magazine that you can pick up back issues and still appreciate their relevance.

Please check out this issue, it’s one of the best issues we’ve read regardless of if we were featured or not. We’re really surprised how much it struck home with us, from featuring charred cedar (which we implemented on our own facade), a tour through Marimekko, and our favorite of all: Ken and Shino Mori’s house tour, which is one of the most beautiful homes we’ve ever seen.

Let us know what you think!