Verkkokauppa.com Brand Guidelines: An Espoo Basement BBS, Jätkäsaari and Verk.com

A teenager, a modem line and a basement in Espoo.

Verkkokauppa.com began in 1992 in Lintuvaara, a district of Espoo, just west of Helsinki. Finnish Wikipedia and the company’s own history both date the start to 11 March 1992, when Samuli Seppälä, then 16, began selling used computer parts from his parents’ basement. The company’s history adds that he did it with his brother Sampsa, and that the pair soon moved on to importing modems from the United States.

It was an online business before the web was. Customers dialled in by modem to a bulletin board system, or BBS, run on the brothers’ computer, and for its first year the shop traded as Arctecho. Finnish Wikipedia says the business moved from the bulletin board to the web gradually between 1994 and 1996, with the first version of its web shop hosted at an address under compart.fi; the company registered the arctecho.com domain in 1997 and the verkkokauppa.com domain in 1998. The name is simply the Finnish for “web shop,” as English Wikipedia notes, and the “.com” has stayed part of the brand ever since.

The web shop always had a counter behind it. A warehouse shop in Lintuvaara served customers until 1996, when the company opened its first store in Kilo, also in Espoo, and it then moved between several Espoo addresses. In August 2004 the store moved into Helsinki, to the Ruoholahti shopping centre. A second store followed at Pirkkala, near Tampere, in August 2006, and a third in Oulu in November 2008, according to Finnish Wikipedia and the company.

In December 2012 the company became a public limited company, Verkkokauppa.com Oyj, Finnish Wikipedia says, and in April 2014 its shares were listed on Nasdaq’s First North growth market in Helsinki. Seppälä stepped down as chief executive in March 2018 to concentrate on board work, and Panu Porkka took over the role, the company says.

A store, a warehouse and an office under one roof.

The building most associated with the brand opened in Helsinki’s Jätkäsaari harbour district on 11 November 2011, replacing the Ruoholahti store, which the company says could no longer keep up with its growth. The company describes it as a 28,000-square-metre site that holds the store, the main warehouse and the offices together, near the West Harbour; Finnish Wikipedia notes that a statue outside, the “Bad Bad Boy,” has become one of the more photographed sights in the city.

A fourth store opened in Raisio, near Turku, in March 2018, and the Pirkkala and Oulu stores were refitted in 2017. As of November 2026, the company’s information page lists four stores, in Helsinki, Pirkkala, Raisio and Oulu, along with about 2,500 pickup points run with the delivery companies Posti and Matkahuolto; its interim report for January to September 2026 counts 589 employees at the end of that September and about 60,000 products in 24 main product groups.

The range grew well beyond computers. In an October 2021 interview with the public broadcaster Yle, Porkka said the company was adding about 100 new products a day, from prams to clothes, and that games, toys and sports goods had been growing alongside consumer electronics. Finnish Wikipedia lists own brands including GZR electric bikes, ProCaster televisions, Ströme small appliances and Anton Oliver grills. An Outlet section sells returned goods by condition grade.

The company has also run into regulators. In March 2024 Finland’s data protection authority imposed an administrative fine and a reprimand after finding that the storage period for customer-account data had not been defined and that requiring shoppers to register before buying was unlawful, and ordered both practices changed, according to a May 2024 summary by the European Data Protection Board.

Warehouses, web shops and store fascias.

Nordic hardware, electronics, discount and beauty retailers are met in several places at once: in large warehouse stores on the edge of town, in city-centre shops, on web shops and, for many years, in printed catalogues pushed through letterboxes. Several of the chains in this series began by selling through the post, and their histories describe the catalogue as the main way customers found products before the store network and the web shop took over that role.

The store fascia is where most of these identities are fixed. The names are usually short and written as plain lettering across a large building, and price signs and offer labels inside the stores carry much of the day-to-day visual weight. Some chains place their own name on the goods as well as on the building, so that the retailer and its own label read as one.

Store and range naming is generally descriptive. Formats, outlets, customer clubs and sub-brands tend to add a plain word to the parent name, and own-label ranges are described by what they are for: tools, garden, car care, home or skin care. In this series we describe those ranges by the names the companies publish, without judging one against another.

The corporate side is part of the public face too. Some of these businesses are family-owned groups that have added property, logistics or hotel companies around the stores; others are listed on Nordic exchanges or sit inside larger international groups. Their own pages on founders, owners and listings are read here alongside dated independent reporting, and the palettes shown are our own unofficial interpretations, not company colour standards.

A web address that became a trading name.

The listing moved up a level in June 2020, when the shares transferred from First North to the main list of Nasdaq Helsinki, according to Finnish Wikipedia and the company; they trade under the ticker VERK. The company remains headquartered in Jätkäsaari.

The brand’s wording has changed less than its range. Finnish Wikipedia records two slogans: “Osta viisaammin. Osta nopeammin” (“Buy smarter. Buy faster”) from 1992 to 2009, and, since 2010, “Todennäköisesti aina halvempi,” which the company translates as “probably always cheaper” and still prints at the top of its website. Both are worded as a promise about buying rather than about any single product.

Outside Finland the name has been adjusted. In February 2025 Yle reported that the company was expanding into Sweden through a partnership with Amazon, and that there the name would be shortened to Verk.com, with the brand and its look otherwise kept the same as in Finland, according to the company’s release. The same report said the company had begun deliveries in Tallinn the previous year with the delivery service Wolt, and had earlier worked with the Swedish web shop CDON. The company’s interim report of October 2026 says it sells in Sweden through marketplaces and its own channel, and that it had made its first next-day deliveries to Stockholm.

For a design guide, Verkkokauppa.com shows how a plain description, the Finnish word for a web shop with its domain ending attached, can carry a retailer from a dial-up bulletin board to a harbour-side store, and why a name tied to one language may need a shorter form abroad. Compare Stockmann, the Helsinki department store, and Tokmanni, another Finnish retailer. For this guide we use brick red, graphite and a Baltic slate with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Verkkokauppa.com’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.