Nordiska Kompaniet celebrates Moomin 80 with wonderful Moomin-themed window displays

The Moomin stories turn 80 years in 2025 and the celebrations have already begun around the world, including Sweden. One of Scandinavia’s leading luxury department stores, Swedish Nordiska Kompaniet, opened a wonderful Moomin exhibition in the store windows and inside and is hosting Moomin-themed events during the anniversary.

Window decorations based on new pop-up book

As a part of the celebrations, the department stores in Stockholm and Göteborg have been decorated with an imaginative Moomin window display, designed by Lithuanian illustrator and paper engineer Elena Selena.

In the windows you can see Moomintroll and Moominmamma travelling through the forest searching for the missing Moominpappa. During the adventures, they meet several small creatures, one of them better known as Sniff.

“Designing windows and pop up books is pretty similar. I studied stage design because I love pop up books, but I wanted to get them to a bigger scale. What’s similar is that we are working with space, layers and light in three dimensions in both pop up books and window displays. But they’re also different because when you’re doing a book, you work a lot alone when doing illustrations. Of course you collaborate with the publisher and so on, but you’re deciding a lot of things on your own. Whereas when you are doing set design – the window displays, for instance – you need to be a team,” Selena tells.

As the entire story revolves around the flood, Selena naturally wanted to include a water element in the windows, but creating an impression of rain and rising water levels was not easy.

“There’s been some challenges with the water, how to get the water to work in the window. I wanted to create an impression as if it was raining and the water was rising because it’s a key aspect in a key scene in the book, the water rising and sweeping everything away. It was a bit challenging, but, with the production team, we managed to find some solutions, like printing some semi-transparent patterns and building an aquarium inside the window. It looks like a water surface, even if it is not real.”

The Moomin exhibition continues inside, where you can find a Moominhouse and a beautiful floral arch – the perfect spot for photos.

Moomin at Nordiska Kompaniet – since 1956

The department store started a collaboration with Tove Jansson in the 1950s. The collaborations with Nordiska Kompaniet and the department store Stockmann in Finland played a significant role in the commersialising of the Moomin stories.

During Tove Jansson and Nordiska Kompaniet’s collaboration, which lasted from 1956 until 1959, NK sold around 70 different Moomin products, including fabrics, puzzles, ceramic figurines, Atelier Fauni dolls and Arabia’s first Moomin tableware. Many of the products were also sold at Stockmann in Finland during the same time.

A separate Moomin department was also set up at the toy section in NK in 1957. Tove Jansson herself attended the opening.

The collaboration also included exclusive products.  The Moomin tea towel pictured above was apparently first sold exclusively at NK and was available in at least three different colours. In the 1950s Tove still designed many Moomin products herself, including the tea towel. Snorkmaiden and the little creep sitting on the green balloon were missing from the first proposal Tove sent to NK, but they asked her to include Snorkmaiden as “she has won everyone’s hearts”.

If you’re interested to read more about Tove Jansson’s collaboration with Nordiska Kompaniet, Anders Landén’s book Treasures from Moominvalley contains a lot of interesting information about how the collaboration started, what kind of products were sold at the department store and for what price and examples of the correspondence between NK and Tove Jansson.

80 years of Moomin stories

2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the Moomin stories. The central theme of the anniversary year is the Moominhouse and what it stands for – a sense of belonging, a place where the door is always open.

Tove Jansson wrote the first Moomin story, The Moomins and the Great Flood, during World War II to comfort herself in dark times, creating a world built on inclusivity and adventure. It is a tale about troubled times and a scattered family. It is also a story about hope, a story about the importance of belonging and having a safe place to call home.