How the VÄKI came to be

I worked ten years as an outdoor guide and my lifestyle has always been closely connected to outdoor sports and nature. I also happen share the nationwide passion for coffee with my fellow Finns.

As every outdoors-enthusiast knows, after some time, you end up having a closet full of products you rarely use. Mugs, cups and plates of different sizes and shapes, pots, coffee makers – you name it.

When I was on a fishing or hiking trip, I used to carry an camping mug, when I was travelling I had another cup with me, and in the city, I was using a reusable coffee mug for the takeaway coffee during the commutes.

I was always looking for that one coffee mug that could do it all, one that would work just as well in basecamp in Lapland as it would in Tokyo fetching a coffee from your favorite barista, or in the travels between the two.

Ideally, you could also use the mug to prepare your own coffee or tea: in the outdoors, at home, or in the office. Sustainable production was another thing on my wish list.

I could not find any product on the market, which fit that description, so I started KOTA².

Our goal was simple: we wanted to create innovative multi-functional products that adapted to your lifestyle. We took inspiration from our Nordic roots and nature, but also from contemporary culture from around the world. As a result, our first product, the VÄKI multi-use coffee mug was born.

The long version, i.e. how I got here

When I was around five years old, my family left the greater Helsinki area, and moved to a small town called Rovaniemi, which was situated right on the Arctic circle in Lapland. My uncle kept teasing about the location, which he said was on the wrong side of the so-called wolf-border, hinting it might be a place, where civilization had not yet reached.

Eventually, we build a house in a newly found neighborhood slapped in the middle of a swampy boreal forest, right next to a lake, which was connected to river Kemijoki, considered one of the best salmon rivers in Europe, before it was harnessed to power production of the nation. The local ski hill was a twenty-minute car ride away.

The neighborhood seemed to be teeming with kids my age and the summer days were reminiscent of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: knife throwing, fishing for pikes, hide-and-seek in the dark forest with flashlights, tress-passing the nearby Forestry Museum with it´s antiquated two-man saws and snowmobiles, building rafts and sailing on them on the lake in stormy weather.

Still, we were not isolated, it was the 1980´s after all. As the area was brand new, we were among the first in Finland to be exposed to cable tv. It was the beginning of the MTV era: endless array of music videos, rock, pop, fashion.

When skateboarding became big, I borrowed one from a friend and tried to learn some moves in the local grocery store parking lot – the only suitable paved area within miles. It didn´t stick, but the Dick Barrymore ski clips, which I taped on VHS, struck a more familiar chord. Skiing off-piste and trying to catch some air at the local ski area became the thing.

Besides fishing and skiing, I also participated in the local boy scouts, which was also a lot of fun. During the winters, we had to hike several kilometers in a dark snow-laden forest with flashlights as our only lights, just to reach the small, visibly moldy, log cabin hut we used for the weekend trips.

Sometimes it was -20 C below zero, and you had to keep the fire going in the woodstove for quite a while, before the cabin was warm. The most fun thing on those trips, besides laughing at the bad jokes, was eating the food you had packed. Nothing like canned tuna on a ryebread with some Swiss cheese, followed by a bar of chocolate.

When we gained some experience, I think we were 12 at the time, me and my friend, built a snow-cave on one of those scout outings, and decided to stay the night there by ourselves. We had read instructions on how to build one in a Finnish outdoor magazine.

We used spruce branches for isolation under our thin mattresses and not-the-greatest sleeping bags, but it was -20 C and windy, so we had to sneak back in the cabin in the middle of the night. We did build a fire first, using Pitchwood – I remember it burning so nicely even in that strong wind.

When I was 15 years old, my family and I moved back to southern Finland. I decided I was too old for boy scouts, but continued skiing and picked up mountain biking. After high school I travelled and skied in the Alps, so when it came time to decide what to study and where, I picked tourism and Lapland.

I worked a decade as a freelance adventure guide and spent two seasons as a snowmobile guide in Lapland. I have lit a fire with feather sticks I have carved myself and cooked cowboy coffee on an open fire countless times.

One of the more memorable experiences was in Lapland, when it was -30 C below, pitch dark with neon green aurora borealis dancing in the sky. I was waiting for a French group of snowmobiling tourists to arrive at a lake peninsula, where I was to greet them with hot cowboy coffee, freshly cooked on open fire.

As I was sitting silently by the fire, sipping the coffee and admiring the aurora, I could suddenly hear the distant roaring of engines, followed by light beams sweeping the opposite shore, then finally crossing the lake.

Later on, I tried how the comforts of a modern office life suited me. It was a different world: marketing, sales, market research. But I never forgot my roots, I continued doing the occasional adventure guide stints and worked as a freelance journalist for a decade, writing mostly to ski magazines with published articles in several European, as well as North American magazines.

Having worked in export sales and marketing, market research, storytelling and product development in the outdoor sector, it became clear that for the next chapter of the story, I would combine all of that, together with my lifelong passion for the outdoors and outdoor sports. That is how KOTA² got started.

Epilogue

Instead of ordering the same mugs and tumblers from the Chinese factory as everyone else, and slapping them with our logos and colour of the season, we decided to develop a unique product of our own. Our team consists of people, who either work or have worked in outdoors or outdoor sports: an outdoor guide, a ski photographer and a ski guide.

We wanted a product that was light enough to carry on Everest, multifunctional enough, so you could ditch the coffee maker and save space in your backpack, one that could also be used in the city and during the travels between the two. One without unnecessary gimmicks and tacky looks, featuring instead functional minimalism and Scandinavian design aesthetics, together with a made-in-Finland production.

The development process wasn´t easy, it took us three years to finalise the product, tackling changing EU legislation on biomaterials, as well as mechanical challenges posed by the modular design, threads and designated use with near boiling water. We field-tested different iterations of the product for two years - from the mountain tops of Lapland to Tokyo, from our home town of Helsinki and the nearby Nuuksio National Park to the Alps - winter through summer.

In the end, we succeeded, and we are now proud to say the VÄKI works just as we intended.

We hope you will enjoy using the VÄKI as much as we do, where ever your adventures may take you!

Jaakko Järvensivu

KOTA² Founder