Despite the fact that a large part of the texts were not in fact stories with a proper plot, the study continued to investigate the different components of storytelling described in the literature review. This section goes through the findings related to those components.
Eleven out of the twenty companies clearly individualized and named the people behind the brand by using a proper noun. In some cases the name of the company itself already referred to the founder either directly (e.g. Minna Parikka, Filippa K’s Filippa Knutsson) or slightly more indirectly (e.g. DAY Birget et Mikkelsen’s Keld Mikkelsen, Bruuns Bazaar’s Teis and Bjorn Bruun, R/H’s Hanna Riihelä and Emilia Hernesniemi).
These companies naturally based their stories on the founders. In addition to these, several other companies communicated their background through the founder, (IvanaHelsinki’s Paola Suhonen, Globe Hope’s, Seija Lukkala, KaksiTvå’s Marjo Kuusinen and Piia Keto, Month of Sundays’ Milla and Iina Kettunen, Elvine’s Daniel Mänd and Designers Remix’s Charlotte Eskildsen)
Instead of naming specific characters some companies referred to the people behind the brand with common nouns. Samuji, Swedish Hasbeens and Samsoe & Samosoe used the personal pronoun “we”, whereas Makia talked about “a group of friends”, nümph about “seven young women”, WeSC about “five guys” and Acne about “four creatives”.
What links these expressions is that they talk about a number of characters, sometimes more specifically, sometimes less. Contrary to all other studied companies, the Finnish
company Costo chose to use simply the brand Costo itself as the character of its story.
When compared to Scandinavian neighbours, the Finnish companies seemed to use the actual names of the people behind the company slightly more. Interestingly, both the Finnish company Makia and the Swedish company Acne did not clearly name the people behind the brand on the texts found on their websites, but did so on their Facebook pages.
Based on the information communicated on the company websites, majority of the Finnish companies were founded by one or few designers, whereas the Swedish and Danish companies were more a combination of people with different backgrounds and roles. Interestingly, the Finnish companies also brought out the educational background of the founders more than their Scandinavian colleagues. The three companies that operated on the streetwear market (Elvine, Makia and WeSC) naturally emphasized their founders’ background in skateboarding or snowboarding, to increase credibility among their target audience.
Three companies did not communicate any clear information about the people behind the brand. Minni f. Ronya did not talk about the founders at all, even though their brand name gives an impression that the company was possibly started by women called Minni and Ronya. Swedish Hasbeens talked about a woman named Anita whose collection of wooden clogs inspired the unnamed founder to start their business, however, no additional information about the founders were given. The Finnish company Samuji also chose to keep the people behind the brand unnamed, even though the founder of the company Samu-Jussi Koski has an impressive background working as the creative director of the internationally known Finnish clothing company Marimakko.
In addition to the main characters i.e. the founders of the company, five out of ten Finnish companies and five out of the ten Swedish and Danish companies also talked about who their target consumer is. Some of these companies settled to describe their
individual with a creative mind”, whereas the clothes of Bruuns Bazaar were made for
“modern style obsessed men and women”, to give a few examples. Some other companies on the other hand described their target consumers in a lengthier manner. For example IvanaHelsinki’s dresses were made for “charismatic drummer girls and girl-women with beautiful souls [-] that love moonlit field, pirates, dark forests, crummy motels, champagne states of drunkenness, fragile butterflies, passionate relationships, cowboys and guardian angels”. In another more descriptive example, the Month of Sunday woman “walks uneven path and takes a break from the rush wherever she wants”, “is spontaneous, nice and smily, but also thoughtful lover of silent moments”
and “dresses her sister by playfully combining clothing details and loving everything soft on her skin”. Contrary to these companies, a few others talked about having a much larger group of target consumers. Costo’s products were for everyone, whereas Minna Parikka’s and WeSC’s for women or people all over the world.
Majority of the companies (15 out of the 20) articulated some kind of cause or mission behind their business. The most popular cause for starting a business was having the hunger to start one’s own label or the need to create something that the founders felt were missing from the market. The former was more common with Finnish companies and the latter more common with Swedish and Danish companies. All in all, Swedish and the Danish companies were a little better at describing their cause with nine out of the ten companies doing so, compared to their Finnish equivalents with only six out of the ten companies.
As noted earlier, majority of the studied texts did not have properly plotted structure and thus cannot be considered actual stories. However, the few that did use a plotted story structure followed a rather traditional form, where first the scene is set and characters introduced, then some kind of driving force is presented, and the story set towards a climax of success. Naturally the ending is left open, as the reality of the company story still continues.
This section has presented the different story elements discovered in the studied texts.
The next section will take a closer look at the messages communicated by the different companies to evaluate the uniqueness of their identities.