Containers, Trains and Automobiles: Varusteleka Road Show 2019

The last year’s Road Show that started in March, had to come to an end. In the year 2019, we stepped up the game and did a total of 23 stops in 16 different cities! When spring finally came and Finns woke up from their polar night hibernation, we hired a Road Captain to take care of Varusteleka’s flying circus: the “Road Show”. We travelled about 6969 km around Finland with 30 employees and it was kick-ass!

We're cool especially when there's a downpour of liquid coolant.

We found ourselves at the Tuska Open Air Metal Festival, Hanko Sailing Competition, Seinäjoki Tango Festivals, Kouvola Security Event, Go-Expo, Nordic Cadet Meeting and of course our very own festival, Lekafest! The cities that treated us best the last year were Pori, Joensuu and Kuopio, the promised land of "Fish Cock".

The top-sellers of the year were the Särmä Large Assault Pack, Scho-Ka-Kola and Särmä Merino Watch Cap. In total, we made 9187 receipts and sold 21230 products. Out of these, 1250 products were ordered from the container to be shipped home.

What Road Show

Varusteleka Road Show is our pop-up container store. It saw its first light as a student project in the shopping mall Mercurius in Vantaa back in 2016. As it was a success, we threw the prototype container into the snowy depths of Tampere in December. It worked so well that we built our own custom container shop and spent about 8000 euros making it.

We are here to spread the good word about the Särmä TST clothing system.

Since 2017, we have been travelling around Finland and this is the concept in a nutshell: bring in the container, open the doors and the shop is open. Hang around for three days; sell stuff, meet old mates and make new ones. After the third day, close the doors and send the container to HQ to resupply and continue towards the next Road Show city!

Why Road Show

Well, why the heck not? We have our own festival called Lekafest, we have opened our own bar “Sotima” inside our store and we have been arranging a shooting competition with quite an appropriate name “Finnish Brutality”.

Doing stuff is fun and most of our lovely customers are not living in Helsinki. That is why we thought that it would be at least reasonable to visit them, so they wouldn't have to always pilgrim to Helsinki for the Varusteleka-experience.

When Varusteleka comes to town, the natives become curious.

The container isn’t too big so there are some limitations to what wares we have to offer. Nevertheless, we want to give our customers the chance to get all the items we have to offer on a silver plate: People can order items from the container store without any shipping costs and with line-cutting prioritization. Usually, items ordered from our container will arrive within a couple of days. We also carry a selection of samples of our hottest products so customers can try them on and fiddle them before ordering them.

When Road Show

Since this has worked quite well for us, it would be sheer madness to quit now. This is why we are going to continue touring even if the world was on the brink of its end. That would raise the demand for our products for sure! We are in fact in the map room of the Varusteleka bunker right now, planning the last defence of Berli.. uh.. The 2020 Road Show.

The exact amount of stops or the cities hasn’t been decided yet, so it is quite possible that we are coming to your city if you are living in Finland.

Sometimes we even visit Kouvola.

As soon as we have figured out the Tour De Finland 2020 we will add the stops to our event calendar.

We also tell you about our upcoming Road Shows in our Propaganda Newsletter, which you can order by becoming a Regular Pig or from your own Regular Pig account!

From out there on the roads