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Headline lessons
The founders of Framery, Samu & Vesa-Matti
Framery began with two Tampere engineering students, Samu Hällfors and Vesa-Matti Marjamäki, who were bothered by a loud open office and decided to build a sound-isolated “phone booth” for workplaces. There was no obvious existing product to copy, so they left their jobs and started building prototypes in a garage, then at a local innovation hub.
In the earliest years, their roles were defined by doing whatever the company needed to stay alive. Vesa-Matti pushed sales and customer conversations, Samu leaned into product and design, and both of them spent a lot of time in manufacturing, delivery, and installation. That setup kept decision-making close to reality: the people selling the product were also the people carrying it, assembling it, and fixing it when it failed.
They were also constrained by money for a long time. With no external funding for roughly four years, the company ran on a simple loop: build something real, sell it, use the cash to improve the biggest issue, and repeat. When founders are starting with limited capital, this kind of “cash-flow financed learning loop” forces speed and customer contact, but it also demands a willingness to live inside unfinished work for a long time.
When Framery started out, there was no clear, packaged market for them to enter. They had a clear vision of what was needed, but no box in which it would fit into, so they had to build the market while building the product. This lead to timing being hard to judge from the inside. From their perspective, you could be early or late, and the “right time” only became clear once growth started accelerating.
Because of that uncertainty, their approach was to stay active in the market rather than waiting for perfect confirmation. They kept pushing, selling, and learning until the moment arrived when demand started to compound. When you cannot predict the timing, the only controllable move is to stay present long enough for timing and effort to meet.
Early on, they also made a strategic identity decision while negotiating with much larger channel partners. Their distributors were “100 times larger,” and they could have accepted a white-label or subcontractor role. Instead, they chose to build Framery as the leading brand. That choice forced them to take product development, product quality, and marketing seriously from the beginning, even when it would have been easier to hide behind someone else’s label.
In the early phase, building the product and building the company were the same thing. Vesa-Matti & Samu were doing everything from designing, to building and delivering. Customers would be surprised when the same guys who sold the booth to them were then delivering and installing it the next day.
That hands-on delivery created their validation loop. The product’s weaknesses were impossible to ignore because the founders met them in the field: weight, assembly complexity, and how easy it was for future installers to make mistakes. Each install turned those constraints into immediate design priorities and pushed them to simplify and improve what actually failed in real use.
They also learned to make progress without waiting for clean signals. Market feedback was often subtle and messy, so they looked for the few signals that repeated and pointed to real value. The operating posture was to act, accept mistakes as part of the process, and correct fast enough that learning stayed ahead of failure.
For Framery, the minimum bar for an MVP was something they could actually sell, and something they genuinely believed they could deliver. That forced them into real customer expectations early, with no room to hide behind prototypes or demos.
Their sales process also doubled as a quality gate. They included product testing before the client purchased. If the product was not good enough in that test, the customer did not buy. That kept the feedback loop honest and tied improvement directly to revenue. The test was a pre-purchase of the booth in the customer’s environment. If it didn’t meet the customer’s bar in that test, the deal didn’t close.
When things broke, reclamations became a core loop. After installations they updated and fixed products on site, and “taking care of the reclamations was our core process,” becoming “probably the second biggest expense after materials.” They chose to carry that cost because it did two things at once: it showed customers and distributors that they would stand behind the product, and it taught them exactly what failed in the field.