Finnish design house Marimekko has been making sweet wares to fill wardrobes and homes for seven decades, so it’s safe to assume that they know their stuff! So, who better to ask about running a successful business than the president and CEO of Marimekko herself, Tiina Alahuhta-Kasko? Below, Tiina shares some nifty tidbits about being a strong leader.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt about being a leader over the course of your career? When I was a younger leader, I felt a little insecure about leading teams and functions where I was not an expert myself. However, I learnt through experience that you do not need to know everything – leading is about building a diverse team with complementary competencies and empowering and supporting each individual to develop and succeed.

What is one skill that you didn’t know a CEO needed until you became one? The level of importance of strong communication skills. Business is all about people, and leadership is very much about communicating with people and ensuring everyone knows the joint direction of the business and how they can contribute to shared goals. This makes the work a meaningful and exciting joint journey.

What are your tips and tricks for people wanting to launch their own fashion label? Developing a successful fashion brand requires a mix of art, science and passion for understanding the target customer. First of all, you need a strong creative vision for the unique value proposition of your brand – what sets your brand apart from all the rest? What are you the best in the world at?

Then, it requires skills from both creative and commercial points of view to bring this vision to life in a way that is meaningful for your target customer. Hence, my advice for anyone planning to launch their own fashion label is to ensure that they have a core team in place with complementary skillsets in the creative and commercial sides of the business.Marimekko has been around for more than 70 years. How do you ensure the brand remains fresh and relevant while also honouring its history? This is the talent and skill of our creative community and boils down to always being true to our original Marimekko DNA, understanding our customers’ lives and styles around the world in-depth, and having a fresh, forward-looking vision on how to translate these into our products and experiences in relevant, meaningful ways for our customers.

Being relevant can also come from presenting something familiar from our history in a completely new context. A great example of this is our recently launched genderless streetwear collection Marimekko Kioski, which brings to life our most iconic, world-renowned prints in a new but natural context: streetwear including sweatshirts, t-shirts, caps and other fun accessories. The Marimekko Kioski also allows us to connect with the next generation of consumers.

What has been the biggest challenge for Marimekko during your time there, and how did you overcome it? The pandemic – first and foremost a human crisis and also the worst crisis experienced by the global fashion industry in decades – temporarily closed our Marimekko stores around the world. While working remotely, we could really see how our strong purpose-driven culture and values glued us – the Marimekko staff around the world – together. We supported each other in this challenging situation and developed agile and new ways of working. This, paired with our strong digital capabilities and continued investments in our brand and collections, allowed us to mitigate the challenging situation very well and in 2021 we actually achieved the highest net sales and operating profit in our history.

What do you consider to be your biggest achievement during your time at Marimekko? I do not consider any achievement being my own – we have achieved everything together as a team at Marimekko. In the past years we have found a good recipe for developing our brand, collections and experience in order to speak to a wider global audience, which – despite the pandemic – is also visible in our good business development, results and overall increased interest in Marimekko around the world. I am very proud of our Marimekko team. Our people work together with such great passion and team spirit.For more small-business stories like this, visit frankie.com.au/strictly-business, or sign up to our monthly e-newsletter. Have a small-business story you’d like to share? Pitch it to us.