Varusteleka's 18th Birthday Week

Varusteleka turns 18 this week and we're celebrating this milestone with some "blast from the past" content. At our walk-in-store, we'll be serving free cake and coffee.

What, no discount sales?!

Even though Company Birthdays and Festive Discount Sales tend to go hand in hand, we're sticking with our strict policy on not giving out massive discounts. The thing is that when such sales-boosting tactics are out of our tool kit, we are not forced to inflate our product prices in order to give big discounts and still make a good profit from them. That's something we feel wouldn't be honest. If you want to know more about our sales margin structure, read this article on the subject written by our founder Valtteri.

Here comes the BUT! Despite our principles, there are situations where we do need to apply some good ol' brute force to our product prices. This happens when we want to remove a product from our assortment and warehouse, most often because it's not selling enough or we're not satisfied with it and want to replace it with another product. These products can be found from our Clearance Sale section and we'll oppress those poor products and their prices till none remain. Yes, we're heartless.

Coffee, buns, and cake at Sotima Bar & Cafe

We'll serve free coffee and cinnamon buns at our Sotima Bar & Cafe for all store visitors. The serving will climax on Saturday the 7th of August with free cake for the first 100 visitors starting from 12:00! Drop by if you're nearby!

And because the legal drinking age in Finland is 18-years-old, we'll serve our weekly special RÖÖPERI Rock’n Roll Beer for 5 euros a bottle!

Event Page on Facebook

Stuff from Memory Lane

Varusteleka's first website in 2003. We've made some changes since then.

Warehous aisle from the time Varusteleka was located at Atomitie. Atomitie translates to Atom Road. A cool address to have your store!

For some time we saved a lot of money by building our own warehouse shelves from wood.

What do you mean that "piles of military surplus on warehouse floors" is not a proper way to storage these?

We've been through a couple of tight spots.

Our walk-in-store at Atomitie (Atom Road) was located on the upper floors of this office building. To get to our store, you needed to enter the building first through a lobby. There were times when the janitor forgot to unlock the lobby doors and we were upstairs wondering why there were no customers. Oh, fun times.

When Varusteleka was a lot smaller, we used to attend a lot of Air-soft games.

Way back our warehouse systems were not that sophisticated and we had a lot of products missing from orders. We used to have this "Sherlock shelf" for orders that had items that were missing. There was a rotating job to act as the Sherlock of the day and try to sort out these problems. Sometimes the missing product for the order was found from the store or our photo studio, but quite often the Sherlock had to call the customer and tell them that we had fucked up.

When we moved to Ruosilantie we had an old concrete warehouse that had previously been a candy factory. There we had the opportunity to make the place our own as it was basically a blank slate. We did a lot of the construction work by ourselves and were quite proud of ourselves.