"The best part of my job is to work with great and talented colleagues!”

“I can state that I have been working at Martela in five decades.”
Kari’s first acquaintance with Martela took place while he was studying marketing at Raisio Commercial Institute. A sales representative from Martela’s Turku office came to visit to tell them about his work and Martela. The presentation left Kari with a very positive impression of the brand – although at that time they did not yet talk much at all about brands, but rather about the company and its operations in general. After finishing his studies, Kari and his wife moved from Turku to Helsinki due to his wife’s job. “I was lucky because the same year as I finished my studies, Martela was looking for a sales representative to work at their Helsinki headquarters, so I started to work there in November 1987.” This was the start of Kari’s long career at Martela.

After a couple of years, they moved back to Turku. Martela’s Turku office had a position open for a sales representative, and Kari was transferred there in the same role. In 1997, Kari moved on to work for a couple of years in sales and marketing at P.O. Korhonen in Raisio, a subsidiary of Martela at that time.

The time at Martela has been really interesting because I have always had the opportunity to work with interesting tasks and challenges.

In 2002, Kari took the opportunity to join the product organisation as a product manager, again at the Helsinki office. Kari became responsible for meeting space furniture, and in this new job he had the opportunity to become more involved in developing the collection, which he found extremely motivating. This continued until 2016, when Kari moved on to leading the development of the entire Martela collection together with his team.

“I have always been very interested in architecture and industrial design. In that sense I feel that this was the ideal role for me. It is also to the benefit of the company that people work in positions they enjoy. This is what keeps them highly motivated and engaged in their jobs.”

In 2021, Kari joined Martela’s executive team, and his title changed once again: VP, Brand & Design. Kari finds his background of having been closely involved with customers and their needs to be a good starting point for his current role. In other words, he has not taken on his role solely from the viewpoint of design, but rather he has a long and solid understanding of customer needs and how those needs impact the development of the collection, for example.

“It gives some background for understanding the current job and for the different views in various parts of the organisation. Our team’s responsibility is interesting in the sense that we serve as a certain kind of junction between customers, sales, R&D and manufacturing. Our job is to find a balance between the needs of all of these parties. In terms of our collection, the outcome must be good products for both customers and Martela, and on the other hand we must use marketing to tell our target groups what kinds of benefits Martela’s products and services offer them. That, perhaps, is both the essence and particular challenge in this job.”

“It would be wonderful if we could provide our customers with products and services that generate positive experiences and make their everyday lives easier.”

Kari hopes that Martela as a company can help its customers in making their own operations smoother and that their employees might feel the same as he does. It has always been pleasant for Kari to go to work, and he could be described as a manifestation of the idea of “Happy Mondays” – a true example of being happy and positive and enjoying work. Kari thinks it is due to the fact that he can do what he enjoys the most. “This being the case, work does not feel like work.”

Kari feels that at Martela he has always had the opportunity to deal with tasks that he finds interesting and that give him just the right amount of challenge. “Although I have been working at Martela in five decades, it has never occurred to me that I should look for another job outside Martela. What is good about Martela is that there are a lot of people with a long career at Martela, which certainly implies that they enjoy working here. Fortunately, in recent years a lot of new faces have also joined us, which is an absolute prerequisite for questioning the established ways of working and for developing things together. The best part of my job has been to work with great and talented colleagues!”