A View from the Top with Sophia Jansson, Moomin creative director

First created as a reaction to the horrors of the Second World War by Finnish artist Tove Jansson, the world of Moominvalley has been enchanting children (and adults) for more than 70 years.

Since their first release in 1945, the Moomin books have been translated into 44 languages, spawned several TV adaptations and films as well as a theme park.

Under Sophia Jansson, who now wears the family mantle as the creative director and chairman of the family firm Moomin Characters Ltd, the company has evolved into a multimillion business with a global retail value of around £607m.

Preserving her aunt’s legacy while keeping the brand relevant for young audiences was a delicate and highly important task, according to Ms Jansson.

Although the final original book in the Moomin series was published in 1971, the stories still sell 20 million copies a year – making Tove Jansson one of the best-selling Finnish writers of all time.

“You can do a lot of things with a brand but if it doesn’t touch a nerve then it’s all in vain.” Ms Jansson says. “My aunt imagined a world where equality, tolerance and democracy were the natural order. It was the core of her philosophy. These themes are still very relevant today, especially when you see what’s happening around the world. But we needed to open up the brand to a new generation.”

Even though she has spent the last 20 years of her life working with the hippopotamus-like creatures, Ms Jansson was not initially drawn to the family business and instead studied art and modern languages.

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“I had no clear idea of what I wanted to do as teenager, but I was curious to see the world and didn’t think that my life was in Finland. I guess life takes you to unexpected places,” she says.

She studied French and Spanish in the US before moving to Madrid where she worked as a teacher. After marrying an Englishman, she moved to London where she had two sons, now aged 28 and 30.

But in 1997, her father got cancer and a recently divorced Jansson moved back to Finland so her children could meet their grandfather before he died. Because she needed work, she took up employment at the then relatively small company, Moomin Characters.

Her father Lars and her aunt Tove died in quick succession in 2000 and 2001 respectively, and the artist’s passing prompted a resurgence of interest in her work as well as a rush of offers to buy the Moomin company.

Ms Jansson said: “After coming back to Finland I realised that making decisions for the company was easy for me. I had grown up in that family and I’ve been watching and hearing stories about Moomins all my life. I knew how my aunt and father liked things done.

“It felt like it was part of my identity and the idea of giving it to someone else didn’t seem like the way forward for me at all.”

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With no prior business training, Ms Jansson quickly realised she needed help to turn the company’s fortunes around.

“I knew everything about the Moomin, the heart of the company, but I needed someone with a business orientated mind”.

She hired Roleff Krakstrom, now her husband and the chief executive of the Moomin brand. Over the past 10 years, the couple managed to turn the brand into the global phenomenon it is today.

“The themes and values explored in the books are timeless and universal – that’s why they endure. But the key was to open up the brand and the classic old stories to a new audience,” she says. “The business side of things was always difficult for my aunt, who was as an artist with a big ‘A‘. It meant that the company was basically set up to take care of things that she didn’t want to think about. Once, she passed away it allowed us to branch out, be more proactive, contact the people we wanted to work with instead of just waiting for the telephone to ring.”

Moomin-mania has been driven by a push into fashion and homeware after Ms Jansson realised that its characters were unusually popular with graphic designers and trendsetters.

“In the creative field, you have a lot of very talented people and many of them know and love Tove’s work. It’s really about finding the right mix and match of people so you can turn it into something good for everyone involved.”

Moominpappa, Moominmamma and Moomintroll became the surprising source of sartorial inspiration for brands, from Ivana Helsinki to Uniqlo, and adorn a million pricey mugs annually.

The gang of hippo-like creatures now also have their own Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts, with more than half a million followers overall, as well as their own website.

“Quite early on we started to think about how we could change the distribution of these stories. Younger people get their information on completely different platforms today, so we decided to build up our web presence, including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram,” Ms Jansson says.

The fact that much of the revenue for Moomin characters comes from licence sales has also drawn criticism, and Ms Jansson admits the balancing act between safeguarding a “national treasure” and doing business is not always simple.

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“Some people ask me: ‘Does this mean you’re going to be changing the core of the brand?’ Well actually, no, we don’t plan to. We see it more as a ‘machine’. If I need to use the phone to reach a person, it’s just a way of communicating – it doesn’t mean my relationship to this person has changed, but I am using this technical device to reach someone.”

Ms Jansson’s recent campaign alongside Oxfam is an example of how the company’s values are being retained and promoted.

Her aunt’s books subtly challenged views on how women should live and behave (Tove Jansson didn’t want to have children and lived with a female partner at a time when homosexuality was illegal in Finland).

In a bid to raise funds for Oxfam’s initiatives to empower women and girls around the world, Moomin Characters Ltd released a special hardback edition of The Invisible Child, a story about a girl who discovers her voice when she is given the respect she deserves, and donated more than €300,000 (£263,400) to the charity from sales.

Ms Jansson said: “In the story, Ninny, the invisible child, overcomes her own fears to defend someone else, so we used it for Oxfam’s campaign helping women in society to have a voice and take part in decision making. It’s a story that is important on so many levels.

“It felt important for me to take part of the campaign because Tove was a woman born at a time when it was not necessarily evident for women to make the choices that she made.

“Discrimination was even greater than today and resistance to her kind of lifestyle was much bigger. She really had to fight hard to have the opportunity to make the choices she made.”

Ms Jansson spends most of her life in Helsinki but also has a home in London. This year has been particularly busy with the opening of a new Moomin theme park in Japan as well as the launch of Sky One’s new animated Moomin series which premiered this April with an all-star cast featuring the voices of Kate Winslet, Jennifer Saunders and Taron Egerton.

“I do feel like I’ve seen too many airports and that I am getting older. In Finland, our whole life cycle built around this long winter and now everyone is just waiting for summer, so I am starting to feel less tired and more positive.”

Does she hope that one of her son’s will take over the family brand soon? “They are members of the board, so they are certainly involved. Of course, for me it would be a very welcome idea but I won’t ask them to do it unless they want to themselves.”

Children’s stories about trolls might not be the first place you would look for women mentors or role models, but Ms Jansson gives credit to her “fiercely independent” aunt for giving her a voice and she’s hoping to help other women to do so through the Moomin brand.

“I feel tremendously lucky and I kind of have to thank my aunt for that. People actually want to hear what I want to say about the Moomins and trust my choices. But at the same time, as a woman, I am still shocked at the fact the world is unequal. I think in my lifetime we will not get to where I was hoping we would, but this shouldn’t be an excuse to give up.”