HÅKKI

HÅKKI is a Swedish art-and-business project founded in 2001 by the artist Tomas Håkki Eriksson, built around the depopulating industrial village of Ljungaverk in northern Sweden. The company describes itself as a project that uses business and art to question globalization and to preserve the cultural and local identity of a small village. Its catalogue is dominated by self-designed t-shirts, with a line of styling wax called Flott Topp as the only product range that reaches beauty retail.

The brand's history is read two ways. A co-founder dates the project to the years 2001–2012 [3], while the official site remains live in 2026 with an active shop, and the wax continues to be stocked by several Nordic retailers. The most consistent reading is that the original collaborative phase ended around 2012 and that Eriksson has carried the brand on alone since then.

The project began, by Eriksson's own account, when he cut off his second mullet at the turn of the millennium "in an attempt to find his identity as an Norrlänning," or North Swede. The plan was simple: design and print t-shirts, sell them, and use the money to support people in Ljungaverk through what the brand calls "various funny projects." Ljungaverk had lost factories, shops and meeting places after its main employer closed in the late 1990s, and according to one account its population had fallen by more than half [3].

Eriksson started the brand in 2001 together with two collaborators, the Norwegian artist Bjørn-Kowalski Hansen and the designer Mats Stenslet [3]. The first store opened in Trondheim, Norway, and the project later ran through three Norwegian sales outlets. The company sums up its method as using "identity as an instrument to create change."

HÅKKI frames itself as a hybrid of art and economics rather than a conventional label, working through a constructed persona — "Håkki" — that Eriksson developed during his art education. The stated mission is to finance local programs in Ljungaverk with revenue from self-produced t-shirts made in collaboration with the local community [3]. The brand's tagline is "From Ljungaverk with love!"

That community funding is part of the brand's public story. According to the co-founder's account, proceeds have paid for new ping-pong tables for the local youth club, free haircuts for residents of Ljungaverk, part of the financing for the village sauna, and the transfer of a Scottish footballer [3].

The hair wax line, Flott Topp, is the part of the catalogue distributed through beauty channels. It is sold in four variants, each described in the brand's own offbeat voice: a softer wax for a "relatively natural Greek-Roman style," a firm matte wax, a high-gloss volumising paste, and a very strong hold "designed to keep your hairdo in place even during hurricanes." Within the wider shop the wax is a smaller subcategory; the catalogue is mostly t-shirts, caps and bags. Production is tied to Ljungaverk, where the early t-shirts were screen-printed in a local workshop [7].

The wax reaches customers through several routes: a single physical store in Ljungaverk, the brand's own webshop, and Nordic beauty retailers including Lyko, Cocopanda, Blivakker, Dofton and Onstyle [4]. It sits at an indie price point.

In 2013 Tomas Håkki Eriksson received the Norrmejerier scholarship, awarded by public vote in Västernorrland to someone judged to have done something good for the Norrland region [5]. He has been profiled repeatedly in regional Swedish media as an artist, lecturer and "rural celebrity," typically described as the founder of the t-shirt label Håkki, with the hair wax treated as a secondary venture [6].

The brand's status is genuinely ambiguous. On his portfolio, co-founder Bjørn-Kowalski Hansen presents Håkki as a finished project spanning 2001 to 2012, by which point the three Norwegian stores had closed [3]. The brand's own site, however, remains operational, and trade publications from recent years describe Eriksson as still producing t-shirts and hair wax through the Håkki persona while teaching art at Ålsta folk high school in Fränsta [7]. Taken together, the evidence points to an active but small solo operation: the collaborative, multi-store phase ended around 2012, after which Eriksson continued the brand alone from the Ljungaverk area, with the Flott Topp wax keeping a marginal presence in Nordic beauty retail.