KEKKILÄ Green Haven Finds Emotional Roots in Finnish Garden Culture
Green Haven is a Finnish film campaign created for gardening and horticultural brand KEKKILÄ by Helsinki-based agency Folk, released in December 2016, using narrative storytelling to position the garden as a space of personal refuge and identity rather than a functional product environment, according to Cyber-Ent.
KEKKILÄ operates across a broad range of gardening and horticultural products — including growing media, soils, composts, fertilisers, and related garden products — categories that have traditionally been sold through rational, benefit-led communication in the Finnish market, according to Mediateam Ie. Green Haven departs from that convention entirely. The campaign centres on a single film asset, a deliberate creative choice that concentrates the brand's communicative weight into one piece of sustained narrative rather than distributing attention across multiple executions. In a household product category where film campaigns often default to demonstration or seasonal utility messaging, this is a structurally distinctive position.
The geographic market is Finland, and the campaign's emotional register is calibrated specifically to that context. The Finnish relationship to outdoor space — and to the garden in particular — carries cultural weight that extends well beyond horticulture. Green Haven appears designed to activate that association, framing KEKKILÄ not merely as a supplier of growing media but as a brand that understands what a garden means to the people who tend it. Released in December 2016, the campaign arrived at the end of the gardening year, a timing decision that aligns the film's reflective, narrative tone with a moment when Finnish audiences are looking back rather than forward. Clapboard assigns Green Haven a score of 60 out of 100, reflecting a campaign that demonstrates creative ambition and tonal coherence without achieving the full distinctiveness its strategic premise promises.
KEKKILÄ chose emotional narrative at a moment when most competitors in the Finnish garden and household product sector were communicating through product functionality. The strategic rationale behind Green Haven rests on a clear insight: that Finnish consumers do not experience their gardens purely as horticultural projects but as extensions of personal and domestic life, spaces that carry emotional meaning through seasons and years. Folk's approach treats this insight as the primary creative lever, building a campaign around feeling rather than feature, according to Norracomms Fi.
The Finnish garden and household product market includes well-established Nordic competitors, according to Tgcmc Newsweaver. Fiskars, one of Scandinavia's most recognised brands in the gardening and household tools space, has historically invested in campaigns that foreground craftsmanship and product heritage. Plantagen, the Nordic garden centre chain with a significant retail presence across Finland, tends to communicate through seasonal availability and product range. Neither brand has consistently occupied the emotional narrative territory that Green Haven stakes out, which gives KEKKILÄ a degree of strategic differentiation that is meaningful precisely because it is category-unusual.
Folk, the Helsinki agency behind the campaign, brings a reputation for craft-led, culturally attuned work to the brief, according to Little Black Book. The agency's involvement signals a creative ambition that goes beyond seasonal campaign production. The strategist on Green Haven was Jaana Haapala-Laiho, and the account was directed by Marja Vattulainen, with agency CEO Tommi Laiho overseeing the broader relationship. This depth of senior involvement suggests the campaign was positioned as a brand-building exercise rather than a tactical product push, consistent with the narrative approach Folk brought to the single-film execution.
Green Haven was directed by Jappe Päivinen, with cinematography handled by Tuomo Virtanen, according to the production record associated with the campaign. The film was produced by Otto Production, a Finnish production company, placing the entire creative and production chain within the Finnish market and ensuring the work carries an authentically local visual sensibility. The combination of Päivinen's direction and Virtanen's camera work suggests a production approach oriented toward observed, atmospheric storytelling rather than constructed commercial imagery.
The creative team at Folk was led by Paula Orre, who served as creative director and art director, with copywriting by Lilli Loiri-Seppä. The pairing of a single creative director and copywriter on a single-film campaign is a structure that tends to produce tonal unity, and Green Haven benefits from that coherence. The film's narrative register — quiet, reflective, personal — is consistent from visual to language, which is a mark of a brief that was clearly held rather than diffused across a larger team. Agency producer Päivi Juusola managed the production process, coordinating between Folk and Otto Production to bring the film to completion within a December 2016 release window.
The original composition for Green Haven was created by Jarkko Meretniemi, a choice that underlines the campaign's commitment to purpose-built craft rather than licensed music. An original score gives the film an emotional specificity that pre-existing tracks rarely provide — it is calibrated to the edit rather than adapted to it. Taken together, the production choices behind Green Haven reflect a campaign that understood its own ambition and assembled the creative resources to pursue it with discipline.
No verified performance data for Green Haven is publicly available. No trade press reviews were found in Campaign, or comparable industry publications, and no award recognition or documented media metrics have been identified for the campaign in the public record. The absence of measurable outcomes is not unusual for a single-film brand campaign released in a mid-sized European market in 2016, where performance reporting for household product advertising was rarely published at campaign level.
Structural analysis offers a more productive lens. Green Haven is built around a single film asset, which concentrates all brand exposure into one sustained narrative encounter. This is a high-conviction structural choice: it demands that the creative execution carry more weight than a campaign distributed across multiple touchpoints, and it succeeds or fails on the quality of that encounter alone. The campaign's emotional strategy — positioning the Finnish garden as a space of identity and refuge — is well-matched to the cultural context of its market, and the production quality, as evidenced by the assembled creative and production team, is appropriate to the ambition of that strategy.
Clapboard assigns Green Haven a score of 60 out of 100. That score reflects a campaign that demonstrates genuine creative intent and tonal consistency, while stopping short of the full creative impact its strategic premise suggests is available. The gap between the insight — which is strong — and the execution — which is accomplished but not transformative — is where the campaign's limitations are most visible. For KEKKILÄ, Green Haven nonetheless represents a meaningful departure from category norms in the Finnish garden and household product market, and a demonstration that Folk was capable of operating at a brand-building level rather than a purely tactical one.
Green Haven is a Finnish film campaign created for KEKKILÄ by Folk agency in Helsinki, released in December 2016. It uses narrative storytelling to position the garden as a space of personal refuge, departing from the functional, product-led communication typical of the Finnish garden and household product category.
Folk, a Helsinki-based creative agency, produced Green Haven for KEKKILÄ in 2016. The campaign team included creative director Paula Orre, copywriter Lilli Loiri-Seppä, strategist Jaana Haapala-Laiho, and account director Marja Vattulainen, with Otto Production handling the film production and Jappe Päivinen directing.
Jappe Päivinen directed the Green Haven film for KEKKILÄ. Director of photography Tuomo Virtanen handled the cinematography, and the film was produced by Otto Production in Finland. Composer Jarkko Meretniemi created an original score, giving the campaign a purpose-built sonic identity calibrated to the film's reflective narrative.
KEKKILÄ operates across gardening and horticultural products including growing media, soils, composts, and fertilisers in Finland. Competitors in the Finnish market include Fiskars, known for gardening tools and craft heritage, and Plantagen, the Nordic garden centre chain with strong Finnish retail presence and seasonal product-range communication.
No award recognition for Green Haven has been identified in the public record. No trade press reviews from Campaign or comparable publications were found for the campaign. Clapboard assigns Green Haven a score of 60 out of 100, reflecting creative ambition and tonal coherence without full transformative impact.
Green Haven launched in December 2016, at the close of the Finnish gardening year. The timing aligns the campaign's reflective, narrative tone with a moment when audiences look back on the season just passed, reinforcing KEKKILÄ's positioning of the garden as a space of personal meaning rather than seasonal utility.
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