Named

Vendor Biography

This is a true story.

In September 2012 we, Saara and Laura, sat down in bus number 72 to go and have lunch with our parents in north-eastern Helsinki. Six months earlier, Saara had completed a degree in fashion and clothing (giving her a range of skills throughout the clothing sector) and Laura had graduated as a designer (of shoes of all things!) around the same time. We both worked with fashion and clothing for different companies, but neither of us were excited by our career paths or felt that our work lined up with our values. On that half-hour bus journey, we immersed ourselves in talk about work. What would we do if we could do whatever we wanted?

We have dabbled in various handicrafts all our lives – from the moment our mother taught us to sew as children (she is an avid handicraft hobbyist). Sewing clothes, in particular, caught our interest. Our solution, therefore, was clear – we wanted to sew and, at the same time, make the sewing hobby, and clothes making in particular, interesting, exciting and attainable for as many people as possible!

When we arrived, we drafted the business plan of our future company in one sitting. Since that moment, we have worked towards our dream every day. We fought through the bureaucracy jungle of founding our business while simultaneously designing and producing our first pattern collection. On the first day of August 2013, we opened our online shop and launched the First Named collection. In the four years that followed, we launched eight new pattern collections at six-month intervals and. In 2018, our first sewing book, Breaking the Pattern, was published, followed by our second sewing book Building the Pattern in 2021.

Today, we are still – or actually more than ever – excited about what we do and, especially, what lies ahead!