“For me, it is all about love and friendship. People are taken care of here, and you can be yourself. I can tell my stupid jokes and laugh and be silly,” Marina Lindström told us. Marina works as Producer at Moomin Characters. She is as excited about her work as the day when she first started several years ago.

“If you work hard, you must have fun. I wouldn't do it if I didn't enjoy it so much. I have gone through some bad experiences in my life, and Moomin has always been there to support me.” Marina's comments suggest that people management at Moomin is something special.

‘The Moomin stories are adored by adults as much as they are by children largely for the range of life lessons and philosophies to be found in Moominvalley’, the Moomin Group onboarding booklet for new employees claims. ‘From the importance of respecting people even if you disagree with them, to how to tell whether or not someone is dangerous by how much they like to eat pancakes and jam, there is wisdom to be found on every page and from every inhabitant, large or small.’

The onboarding booklet recites the Moomin values of love, equality, and courage. We are told that Tove Jansson's Moomins follow these values ‘to live in happiness and harmony with their diverse group of friends and acquaintances’. All Moomin employees, old and new, are invited to join in and make the leap from fiction to their work and lives. The onboarding booklet takes people by the hand and lets them know what this could mean. Yet, these materials only tell so much, and the reality is more complicated.

“Some people say that you can't be married to your work, but I love my work and I love my colleagues,” Marina Lindström told us with a smile. “It's more than work. It's like the Moominhouse where everyone is taken care of and respected and welcomed. There are also some disagreements, but it's just a special atmosphere here, that you don't find elsewhere.”

“I enjoy the fact that more and more licensees are using Tove's original artwork, because I think her drawings are unique and wonderful. Businesses are lining up to collaborate with us,” Sophia Jansson, Chairperson of the Moomin Characters board, said.

“In the beginning, Tove decided what was a viable Moomin product, then my dad Lars. Now it is me, Roleff, and my sons. I think our values and guidelines have not really changed. Moomin products are an extension of what the Moomins represent, the passion and the philosophy.”

Passion, and all the passionate connections and relations people have with Moomin, lead to an urgent need to coordinate and organize activities across time and space. Coordinating and organizing at the crossroads of passions is an integral part of the Moomin business and it has given rise to what we refer to as the Moomin ecosystem.

The sense of passion brings a specific flavour to coordinating the ecosystem. While coordination is commonly understood as the setting up of governance mechanisms and interventions to align interests and activities, at Moomin it seems to be more emergent. Coordination is more about finding common causes and interests than about setting up elaborate systems and monitoring them.

The Moomin ecosystem engages in numerous strategic partnerships that keep the brand alive. Working with companies that share Tove Jansson's vision of life is central to this. Relations with the more than 700 licensees that Moomin has vary in depth and scope. Working with non- profit organizations and engaging in charities and fundraising is a fundamentally important element of the Moomin ecosystem. Moomin stakeholders are a wide and varied group.

Strategic partnerships refer here to Moomin's formalized (through licensing contracts, for example) relationships with other companies. Strategy scholar Robert M. Grant maintained that strategic partnerships help to tap into and utilize strengths of other companies to make both companies stronger in the long run.

This is evident in how Moomin operates. Stakeholder is a wider concept for us, depicting all kinds of people and organizations that feature in Moomin's strategic partnerships. It denotes the fluffy boundaries of business operations. What or who is a stakeholder needs to be determined case by case.

Moomin Characters Ltd CEO Roleff Kråkström told us enthusiastically:

Today, Moomin is a valuable brand. Moomin Characters operates a copyright and licensing business based on registered trademarks, which is about developing and selling the Moomin brand and protecting it from wrong uses and associations. The management constantly works on positioning Moomin in the market and differentiating it from competitors and other players. Coherence and clarity are crucial in branding and storytelling about the Moomins.

Put simply, a brand is a name, term, design, symbol, or other feature that helps distinguish a product, service, or company from others. Branding, as activities and practices, refers to efforts, conscious and unconscious, or intentional and unintentional, that help make those distinctions.

Proponents take branding for granted and critics scorn it. As the communication scholar Dennis K. Mumby argues, branding is a constitutive feature of organizing in contemporary capitalism. It is ubiquitous and ‘hidden in plain sight’. This means that we are advised to be healthily suspicious of everything done in the name of brands – and of how brands start to steer our thinking and behaviour.

In this chapter, the focus is on the Moomin brand as an interface with consumers as clients. The Moomin ecosystem is characterized by managing what we consider to be a universally local brand, while staying true to its roots.

“Tove Jansson expressly stripped Moomin of all references to any political system, religion, country or place in the world,” Roleff Kråkström reflected. “The Moomins have a huge appetite for life, and they live happily in the Moominvalley. They are completely unaware of their creator being a Swedish- speaking Finn.”

In this chapter, we trace the journey from Tove Jansson's creations to a global art- based brand and growing business ecosystem. Moomin business is based on the conviction that taking care of people and showing respect and deference to them is crucial for retaining a resilient organization. This is not coincidental. The way Moomin operates today is based on the legacy of Tove Jansson and those around her.

It is impossible to pin down exactly when the Moomins were first conceived. And why should that matter anyway? The Moomin story goes on – or stories, in the plural. Stories develop and they change form. New stories are created, and old ones fade away. There are many versions of what happened when the Moomins began to travel the world. All storytellers tell their own version in a certain light and from a particular position.

Time plays a role in every story. The linear time structure of stories with a beginning, middle, and end draws from classic Aristotelian ideas. These can be used for retrospection and to draw on the past to make sense of the present and future.

Critical organization scholar David M. Boje alerts us to fluidity in the way different pasts and futures come together in temporal sensemaking of an emergent present. Boje argues that seemingly coherent narratives that are built on retrospective sensemaking serve to control and regulate. There are always alternative stories that we choose not to tell or let be told.

As human beings, we tend to impose a form of chronological order to happenings and events, and forge connections between them. We attempt to see stories unfold in, and over, time. We search for and discover plots that we find appealing. We do this although we know that life is complicated and messy, and not very ordered. It is often only with the benefit of hindsight that the plot emerges and the story finds its intended meaning.

Our narrative of Moomin involves many important characters – and we are not thinking about the Moomins themselves, but real people who have contributed to their success. We cannot pretend to do justice to all of them. We inescapably valorize some and downplay others.