In the world of brands and trademarks, it is important to stand out from competitors. Alpa processes Andean gold, alpaca wool, into timeless favorite knitwear for its growing customer base. The trademark protected alpa® brand differentiates itself through premium quality and successfully combines e-commerce with brick-and-mortar sales.
Founded in 2012, AlpaFinlandia Oy, more familiarly known as Alpa, has succeeded in building a strong alpa® brand from its initially small webstore. Presently, there are no limits to growth in Finland or in international markets.
Digital Commerce Finland, which accelerates the development and growth of digital commerce in Finland, selected Alpa as the growth company of the year 2025 in the medium-sized companies’ category.
Alpa's CEO & Partner Joona Penttilä considers the win a significant recognition.
"Alpa's background is strongly in e-commerce. We have grown into a medium-sized company specifically as an online business right up until 2022," Joona explains.
However, at that time the company had noticed that the growth pace in e-commerce had begun to slow down to some extent. Additionally, especially due to COVID and financial challenges, many retail stores had been forced to close their doors. Despite the general distress in brick-and-mortar sales, Alpa decided to boldly go against the current. It completely abandoned reselling and began investing heavily in its own brand stores. The goal was to simultaneously accelerate online sales, but above all to improve customer service and the brand experience.
"We wanted to bring the products closer to consumers. Establishing our own brand stores has been a strategic, extremely significant, and commercially profitable complement alongside e-commerce. Currently, already half of our revenue comes from store sales," Joona says.
Protecting brand rights to secure investments
The company sees great opportunities to scale its business. Customers praise the knitwear in their feedback, saying they want to wear them "always," and return shopping again. The Alpa phenomenon has emerged, and it is not limited to the domestic market.
"Over the past year, the international market has opened up in a completely new way. Our exports have tripled. The Alpa phenomenon is thus demonstrably repeatable in significantly larger markets than Finland," Joona says.
When Alpa's international growth opportunities began to look promising, the company's founding team wanted to ensure the expansion of brand rights to international markets, so that the millions of euros invested in the brand, product development and marketing would remain secure.
"It was clear to us from the beginning that brand protection is an area that requires experience and specialized expertise, and we wanted to outsource it to a partner who is well-versed in these matters. We are happy to pay for our company's most valuable asset, the brand and the legal rights associated with it, to be in good hands," Joona describes.
He says he conducted background research and evaluation to find "Finland's strongest" expertise in the trademark field, and based on that, discussed with several trademark lawyers representing different companies before making his partner choice. Jani Kaulo was also selected for these discussions.
"I was quite quickly convinced that he really has the competence, experience, and strategic vision for brand protection," Joona describes the beginning of the collaboration.
When Jani Kaulo founded his own law firm specializing in brand rights, Kaulo & Partners, in autumn 2021 with his colleague Maria Puronvarsi, Alpa was the company's first partner client for the Outsourced Legal Counsel service concept.
"We have great confidence that Alpa's brand right matters are handled well. Jani and Maria have also patiently explained trademark practices and jurisprudence to us. Through the collaboration, we've continuously learned more about these matters ourselves," Joona says.
He says he particularly values the proactive approach and the well-founded recommendations for action that make decision-making easy.
"We've received really good and proactive information in different situations, as well as clear recommendations for action. That's what we expect from a trademark and legal partner, and that's what we've received. It's been easy to approve the recommendations, saying 'clear, let's implement this.'"
Enforcement and monitoring of brand rights, trademark searches, contract consulting
The Outsourced Legal Counsel service has included various types of collaboration to increase the brand value and anticipate and tackle brand rights-related risks in international markets. The collaboration has focused not only on increasing the brand equity, but also on monitoring and enforcing one's own rights.
Right at the beginning of the collaboration, there was a trademark dispute to be resolved. It threatened to prevent the registration of the alpa® brand name in the EU, and would have made it difficult to extend protection to countries outside the EU. Another brand holder opposed the registration, citing their earlier somewhat similar brand name registration and a partially overlapping product classification. In negotiations, Maria Puronvarsi succeeded in resolving the dispute amicably, and alpa® was registered as a trademark in the EU for all products and services relevant to Alpa's business.
Since then, trademark rights have been extended to key target countries outside the EU as well. Additionally, a trademark search has been conducted to explore the possibilities for expanding the business in the future to the challenging but attractively large US markets. A preliminary strategy has been prepared for the market entry based on competitor information provided by the search.
After acquiring exclusive rights, Alpa has also wanted to outsource the global trademark watch to Kaulo & Partners. This ensures that competitors cannot register trademarks that come too close to the alpa® brand, which would weaken the brand’s value and distinctiveness. The monitoring has already identified several such applications. By opposing these, it has been possible to prevent the registration of overly similar trademarks for the products and services to which Alpa has exclusive rights through its own trademark.
"Maria has provided us with timely information about applications that are harmful to Alpa's business and brand, as well as recommendations on how to proceed, and what aspects and costs are involved. For us, this has been an easy process to defend our brand," Joona says.
Legal consultation on agreements with business partners and personnel has also been important in the collaboration. In addition, guidelines have been drawn up for Alpa regarding the proper use of trademarks.
"It's important for us that agreements are clear to all parties, so we avoid disputes afterwards. For example, the manufacturing agreement template that Maria prepared for our production partners was significant. With personnel, we've also wanted to agree on principles for using personal photos and videos in marketing," Joona highlights as examples.
Success recipe from outside the fashion bubble
Alpa is a great example of a profitable textile and fashion company in Finland. Since its founding, Alpa has been able to increase its sales even in weaker economic times. What is Alpa's recipe for success?
According to Joona, everything starts with high-quality, long-lasting, and responsible products that customers also value. Immediately after, he highlights the business perspective and that Alpa is a "very number-oriented company."
"We calculate all costs and product margins very precisely. The products' margin structure is on a healthy foundation."
Joona also highlights Alpa's courage to do things their own way, "from outside the fashion bubble." He surprises by revealing that none of the five partners had previous textile or fashion industry experience. The company's biggest visionary, Heikki Timlin, who fell in love with alpaca wool on his Peru trip and developed the business idea, has gathered around him the rest of the team. This team together possess almost all the business-critical specialized expertise needed: e-commerce, finance, procurement, production, logistics, warehouse automation and IT expertise, as well as marketing and sales. Ainomaria Haataja, Heikki's sister who has studied fashion and textile design at the Aalto University in Finland, designs the alpa® products and their various knit surfaces.
"It's a big competitive advantage for us that we sell the products ourselves both online and in brand stores, and at the same time collect direct feedback from our customers," Joona adds to Alpa's success recipe.
Alpa's Founding Partner Heikki Timlin and Designer Ainomaria Haataja
Pop-up stores accelerate sales and growth
Finland is currently a strong pillar of Alpa's growth financing. In the domestic market, the brand already has very good recognition. The average customer rating for products is an impressive 4.8/5. A significant second-hand market and repair services have also developed around the quality knitwear. The brand has been adopted into wardrobes as trusted knitwear by men alongside women. Men account for a very significant share of the growing customer base.
Alongside the already established brand stores in home base Jyväskylä, Helsinki, and Tampere, a cluster of pop-up stores has risen this autumn in Espoo, in the shopping centres Sello, Iso Omena, and Ainoa. The pop-up concept was tested earlier in spring in Oulu.
"The concept has now been refined further. Alpa has ready processes including recruitment for quick new openings, including self-designed brand-appropriate store fixtures and clothing racks that can be efficiently transported as pallets anywhere," Joona describes.
The goal is to expand the store network in the near future and test the best locations as good new and suitably sized stores are found.
Will alpa® overtake iconic Finnish brands?
Joona compares Alpa and its fast-growing store network vision to the iconic Marimekko as an accelerator for its own sales.
"Yes, we're already thinking big, that Alpa has every opportunity to surpass Marimekko both in Finland and in international markets in the future," Joona says.
The doors to Europe are already wide open. Large markets like Germany and France stand out, but through digital marketing and three own online stores (.fi, .se, .com), broad interest in the products exist. Alpa® knitwear have been sold to all EU countries. So far, Alpa has not wanted to rush its growth too much, and has increased the production and financed the growth at a moderate pace with own revenue.
“We are interested in a more drastic growth leap. That requires larger capital, and we have discussed with investors,” Joona states.
"Then when we enter these larger international financing scenarios, the protected brand is our most valuable asset — also for investors."
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