Marimekko Opens Its First Paris Store And It’s A Roadmap For The Future

Marimekko opened a store in the City of Light as part of the brand’s strategy of deploying more stores in Asia Pacific and Europe.

COURTESY OF MARIMEKKO

Finnish lifestyle brand Marimekko last week opened its first store in Paris, a 1,500-square-foot flagship at 120 Rue Vieille du Temple in the Marais district, an historic and trendy neighborhood, which was once an enclave for artists such as Andrè Maire and Eugène Delacroix and now boasts galleries representing modern day heavyweights such as Jeff Koons.

It’s the latest step in the company’s international expansion, following a flagship that last month opened in Hong Kong. “The Paris store is part of our long time strategy of identifying the most important key cities in the world and their halo effect on other cities,” Rebekka Bay, Marimekko’s creative director told me in an interview.

The company plans to open 10 to 15 new stores next year in the Asia Pacific region.

Marimekko is traded on the Nasdaq Helsinki Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol MEKKO, and on the US OTC market under the symbol MKKOF. The company’s net sales for 2025 are expected to grow over last year’s $209.8 million, but Marimekko is uncertain by how much due to uncertainty over tariffs and other trade policies in its main markets that could impact consumer confidence and buying behavior.

Marimekko’s domestic market, Finland, represents about half of the company’s net sales, which in 2025 will be impacted by the weak general economy and low consumer confidence, the company said. “Despite the weak market situation, net sales in Finland are expected to be approximately at the level of the previous year or increase slightly,” the firm said.

Sustainability is important to Marimekko. DNB Carnegie, a Nordic investment bank, on November 6 named Marimekko, one of three winners of its annual sustainability award. The Finnish company was the small cap winner. DBN said Marimekko’s design philosophy focuses on creating timeless products that stand the test of time using durable materials such as recycled cotton and wool.

For Marimekko, it’s all about scaling up its international markets and key markets in Northern Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific region, Tiina Alahuta-Kasko, CEO of Marimekko said last year. “We approach these key markets in key cities and focus on capturing growth in our existing markets, especially in Asia,” she said.

The company last year launched a traveling pop-up exhibition across Asia Pacific to expose its prints to discerning consumers in the region. The touring pop-up exhibition, called “The Field of Flowers,” focused on the brand’s well-known floral-themed designs.

The trip to Paris was well thought-out. Paris is an important city in terms of industry, culture, and fashion. It’s also important in terms of the global audience that travels there. “Having a store in Le Marais, is an amazing opportunity for us to engage with a more artistic, cultural design community, but also at the same time being a window to the rest of the world,” Bay said.

The flagship will play an important role in reinforcing Marimekko’s global brand awareness and positioning and will support the broader “scaling of the Marimekko brand phenomenon and long-term growth across different channels and markets,” Bay said.

The store is intended to be at once visually arresting and nostalgia-evoking for Baby Boomers who fell in love with the brand when it bowed in 1951. “We don’t have any other store where we’re utilizing textiles so much as an architectural element,” said Bay of Marimekko, which was founded by Armi Ratia and is based on the art of printmaking. “The Paris store is the first time where we created almost in a conceptual way, this idea that you’re visiting someone’s home.”

The design house in 2022 opened an experiential retail space on Wooster Street in SoHo, which was more of a conceptual abstraction than rooms with clearly defined walls. The inspiration for the Paris store, came from Marimekko’s textile printing factory in Helsinki, a facsimile of which Marimekko has in the middle of its headquarters in that city.

“The Paris store is an evolution of that concept, which we have finessed over the time,” Bay said. “The idea was creating an honest transparent space so you understand all the operations of the space,” Bay said, referring to the fact that the store, which has a corner spot on the street with large windows, is very open and airy. In addition to technical elements, there are accents of primary colors culled from printing screens and transferred onto metal railings in the store, all referencing the mill.

The flagship is an homage to Marimekko’s colorful printmaking, which started with a dress and has grown to include products for every corner of the house. In addition to a full ready-to-wear collection, there’s handbags, accessories and lifestyle products, all imbued with the brand’s happy prints. The company has transferred its patterns onto thousands of products from apparel to bath essentials such as shower curtains, robes and towels to home textiles, bedding, and stationary.

“There’s a lot of firsts in the Paris store,” Bay said, referring to the Souvenir Shop, which highlights an assortment of evolving designs, including small accessories, and impulse buys such as a Marimekko mug with the Unikko pattern. That first-ever print can be seen on everything from apparel, such as the Sopiva Unikko cotton linen dress for $345, to cookie cutters, three for $25.

“The space we call the Souvenir Shop has the most iconic pieces, but also easy grab-and- go items like T-shirts, hair accessories, socks and key rings, to invite our new Parisian community into the brand and give them an easy entrance into the brand with gentler prices,” Bay said.

Marimekko won’t run out of ideas for stamping fabric and other surfaces any time soon. The company has an archive of almost 4,000 prints. It keeps them alive by revisiting and tweaking some of them every season. There’s even furniture through a collaboration with Artek x Marimekko, where the art of printmaking meets the technology of wood bending.

In terms of fashion, patterns include everything from the florals of Unikko and Tumma, to abstract linear prints like Jokuraita that fuse “optimism with diverse silhouettes,” Bay said. “It’s not for everyone to wear head-to-toe patterns, so it will be an opportunity for us to educate and inspire the customers.

“Being a Finnish brand we are priding ourselves not only on being bold prints and colors, but also being quite functionalistic and utilitarian,” Bay said. “We create products that you can run in, not dresses to look nice in, but also dresses that will move with your life.”

Case in point: denim, which the company said is the perfect foil for bold prints. It’s called Maridenim and it includes high-waisted straight leg, wide leg and barrel jeans, which can be paired with a printed denim shirt or plain turtleneck for a less matchy-match approach.

Marimekko launched Maire denim last year and it’s been selling briskly. The styles appeal to a “global audience of all ages,” said Bay. “One might think that really bold patterned denim would speak to a certain segment, but the truth is if you’re a middle-aged male or young hip female, you are attracted to denim. We’re printing our patterns into the denim fabric. It really speaks to the Marimekko values of being timeless and having this universal, almost utilitarian value.”

The store is a paean to images. “What is most special about the Paris store is how we’re bringing the Marimekko way of life to life through our stores,” said Bay. “With the patterns and prints, we have really treated the store as a canvas for the art of printmaking.”

Dedicated zones in custom colors were designed for customers to explore and experience the Marimekko universe seamlessly across product categories as if they were strolling through someone’s well-appointed and vividly-colored house. The Walk-in-Closet displays full editorial looks, bags are shown in their own environment and the dining area serves up ideas for table-settings and home decor.

Sanna-Kaisa Niikko, chief marketing officer, said the Marimekko Le Marais store is the brand’s home in Paris and will do more than simply sell products. “The store concept allows us to host community activations and events in addition to day-to-day operations,” she said.

“We had our opening party in the store on October 23, where we transformed the space into a dance floor and brought together local opinion leaders, media and other stakeholders with music provided by DJ Arman Naféei,” she said. “We can also transform the store section dedicated to our home products into a hosting area and organize, for example, breakfast events there.”