Design story - Gässling underwear

Marketing sometimes fails to deliver the original design intent to the customer. Since the contradiction between design and marketing has been intriguing me, I was really exited when I had the chance to discuss with Joakim how a garment that now supports a whole new underwear brand Gässling was designed and is now marketed.

I wish all the best for Joakim and I just checked that you can still order some treats for christmas ;)

The name
In short, Gässling is a Swedish underwear brand that makes premium eco underwear for style conscious men. From the very beginning we wanted to create a brand based on Swedish values that was primarily focused on an international market.

We knew that we wanted to use organic cotton and that they should be manufactured in a responsible manner and we needed a brand name that could reflect this as well as look Swedish. The name should fulfill these criteria; be Swedish but not look strange in English, speak of nature, have a local connection to Malmö where we’re based and to be easy to remember.

We started to analyse different traits of nature and eventually we got hooked on the goose. We thought it was a good animal for us because there are lots of geese in Malmö and it has very sympathetic traits. For instance if a goose gets injured during flight, another goose will stay behind until it gets better or dies. It took about 1.5 months and a lot of debating to come up with the name Gässling, which means gosling in Swedish (goose baby).

The product
It’s usually said that in order to break into a saturated market your product need to outperform the competition tenfold.
I wouldn’t say that our underwear is ten times better than other underwear but we have done our very utmost to create some killer garments. We tried to list all available pain points and address them one at a time. Some details that are worth mentioning are that we don’t have a care instruction tag inside, but they are instead printed for better comfort. The waistband is covered in fabric for a smooth feel and there are no seams in the back or sides of the garment to make it as clean as possible.
Our second - more aspirational product is the first ever (as far as I know) tight fitting boxer with an openable waistband. To give it an extra exclusive look we used fabric covered buttons that were all custom made to match the color of the main fabric.

What’s next
We have now been online a few days and even though we are still very far from sold out we can see that the main traffic is coming from outside of Sweden and predominately from the US. This tells us that we probably made some correct decisions when creating the brand. Now we need to turn those page views into purchases but if we succeed with that is another story. 

Egolocical thinking as a strategy; Patagonia and Basecamp Oulanka

Some might say that Patagonia is crazy company when launching a campaign with the motto "Don't Buy This Shirt Unless You Need It".

For me, it made read through their values and find out that Patagonia is one of the leading companies in the world really finding ways to produce it's outdoor gear in the most ecological way possible.


Outdoor lovers use enormous amounts of different kind of synthetic fibres, plastics and composite products. It's about time that there are some leaders in making our consumption leaner so that we will not destroy our environment while enjoying it.

Another good example of ecological thinking in nature travel is Basecamp Oulanka in Kuusamo. They arrange a range of wilderness activities from extreme adventures to well-being holidays - all with high environmental, social and economical standards.
Seeing what modern wilderness tourism has done to many areas of Finnish Lapland, doing things really in the original way and minimizing operational footprint in every way is a refreshing, delightful and not a bit less fun.

Buy a Patagonia - if you really need one, and go to Kuusamo to enjoy some real experiences!

Aging in style

I love products that age with style.
In fact I might not be the most careful user of products, since I want them to look that they've been used. Especially outdoor gear looks a bit newbie if it's brand new.

When I unscrewed these worn lock pedals I felt slightly sad, but on the other hand happy to be able to look what they've gone through.

If you try to find a material that ages with style - go with aluminum, but be careful not to overdo the finish since the phase between glossy surface and worn out style might be nasty.

Design for errors

Example of Nielsens usability principle "design for errors" emerges in this "there I fixed it" -type of improvement of attached traditional finnish craftmanship.

Another good principle of "keep it simple" has failed in this case and there is some reported cases, when somebody has carefully closed the door behind - and locked a poor soul into the hut. Then again the repair (red string going inside the door) is kind of simple too ;)

Extra effort caused by elimination of disposable packages

Although elimination of disposable packages in eg. Scandic hotel chain has been a great action for environment, some challenges that originally influenced to the very trend remain.

One of those is cleaning. Especially anything related to toiletries should deserve extra attention. Unfortunately this is often overlooked by maids, as well as the people who make the cleaning contracts.

Suddenly everything stops

Imagine that you rush into your hotel room with you hands full and drop your keycard to the floor when trying to shovel it into the main light switch while the door is closing behind you.

Suddenly you get a feeling that there's no rush and the best thing to do is crawl on the floor in total blackness.
-Further you can't avoid thinking that this was not considered, when the brilliant idea of key card operating main switch was introduced to hotel businnes.

Plastic bag seal generation 2

Remember those red little plastic demons, that ensure you will starve, before granting you the access to you carrots? I say no more of those.
Pirkka carrots have used a similar kind of plastic tape seal in a way that it forms handles to pull the two sides apart. Also the piece of paper that is used to create the handles features the best before date.
How convenient with only a small change! -Although, in my opinion this has been pending a little too long to fix such a simple but highly annoying problem.

Recloseable paper packaging

This is my regular ice-cream purchase from my next door shop. -It's not that I would like Dajm That much, but I buy it because of it's packaging.
It's unbelievable to see the amount of plastic waste in my bin nowadays. Everything comes in plastic, like ice-cream. That is, if you don't want to use the old fashioned paper-wrap that is super ecological, but a mightmare to reclose.
This package on the other hand, is paper and is easy to close tightly after taking some :)
-Can it really be that plastic is cheaper or why the vast majority of ice-creams are encased by plastic?