Forget Finnish noise cancelling headphones, here’s a better alternative

Iltalehti today (14 May): “Forget Finnish noise cancelling headphones, here’s a better option”.

Those other headphones are probably great. But when pretty much the only Finnish manufacturer in this category is Valco, that headline did hit a bit of a nerve.

Not in some noble, poetic way where I stare out over a lake and recite Eino Leino. More in the Kainuu way, where I stared at a coffee cup and wondered if the fuck we should move to Estonia.

Not because the journalist should praise us. They shouldn’t. If the product is crap, you can say the product is crap. If the entrepreneur is an idiot, you can say that too. The first time I said we were going to design and launch our own headphone model, a friend called me crazy. So the line starts with Pasi. In the interest of honesty, he wasn’t completely wrong.

We compete with Sony, Apple, Samsung and Bose. They’ve got legal departments, skyscrapers and working groups whose only job is to decide what the rustle of the packaging plastic should sound like in a video. Apple’s revenue alone is bigger than Finland’s GDP.

We’ve got about 20 people, plus partners. We design, sell and service headphones in Finland.

And still, we idiots are up there in the top scrap on Finland’s tiny market. Our products get compared with ones that cost twice as much, and our customer satisfaction survey looks so good that if customers didn’t send us photos with the Valco logo tattooed on their forearm, we wouldn’t believe it ourselves. We’re not perfect, but we also don’t disappear into the cloud the second a customer has a problem.

With the same market share globally, Valco would be doing over a billion in revenue. Basically on a zero budget and with a couple of headphone models. 

At this point, a sensible person would go looking for funding abroad and shake the dust of Finland off their feet.

But we don’t want to.

We want to build a factory in the middle of nowhere in Puolanka. Make world-class products in Finland and Europe. Not for the stock market, not for investors, not for quick profits. Just because we want to do it, and we’re proud of that.

The taxes get paid here. Our contribution alone isn’t going to build a new children’s hospital, deal with the pension time bomb or save the whole welfare state. But it does something. Maybe it fills one frost heave pothole, buys some muddy overtrousers for a daycare centre, or keeps some health centre coffee maker alive.

When I tell people this, they look at me like I just announced I was going to build a submarine out of potatoes. 

Sometimes it feels like Finland has a strange national acid reflux disease: if someone here tries something unnecessarily ambitious, people immediately start getting heartburn.

In Finland, you’ve got to be an idiot to become an entrepreneur. Luckily, there are still a few of us left.

Besides.

Anyone can succeed in America. 

But how many have succeeded in Kainuu?