A national tabloid told readers to forget Finnish headphones. I run practically the only Finnish headphone company, so yes, it stung a bit.

A Finnish national tabloid published a headline today telling readers to “forget Finnish noise-cancelling headphones” and buy this instead.

Fair enough. The recommended headphones are probably excellent.

But I run a small headphone company in Finland. Actually more or less the only Finnish manufacturer in this category. So I admit it: the headline stung a bit.

Not in some noble way where I stared across a lake and recited national poetry. More in the Northern Finnish way, where you stare into a half-empty coffee cup and briefly consider ”f*ck this sh*t, I am moving the whole company to another country”.

We compete with Sony, Apple, Samsung and Bose.

They have legal departments, skyscrapers and probably entire teams dedicated to the exact emotional tone of plastic wrapping in unboxing videos. Apple’s revenue alone is larger than Finland’s GDP.

We have about 20 people, plus partners. We design, sell and repair headphones in Finland.

Somehow, we are still near the top of the Finnish market in our category. Our products get compared to models twice the price. Our customer satisfaction is so good that I would not believe it if customers didn’t send us photos of our logo tattooed on their arms.

We are not perfect. But when a customer has a problem, we do not vanish into the cloud and send them to a chatbot named Melissa.

With the same market share globally, our company would be doing over a billion in revenue. So far this has been built with practically no budget and a couple of headphone models.

A sensible person would raise money abroad, move the company somewhere easier and write an annoying LinkedIn post about “the next chapter.”

But we don’t want to.

We want to build a factory in the middle of nowhere in Northern Finland. Make world-class products in Finland and Europe. Pay taxes here. Employ people here. Repair products here instead of throwing them into the great electronic graveyard.

When I tell people this, they look at me as if I had announced I was building a submarine out of a potato.

Sometimes it feels like Finland has a national acid reflux disease. If someone tries something unnecessarily ambitious here, people immediately get heartburn.

You have to be a bit of an idiot to become an entrepreneur in Finland.