In this episode of the Speak PR podcast, host Jim James walks listeners through a deep‑dive case study of the Swedish outdoor brand Fjällräven and its iconic Kånken backpack. He begins by noting how the product’s massive word‑of‑mouth—over 5,900 Google reviews with an average 4.7‑star rating—prompted his family to purchase an £85 backpack for his daughter. Jim then examines the brand’s website, highlighting the prominent sustainability section, the mission statement about functional, durable, timeless gear, and the visual storytelling that positions the company as an environmentally responsible outdoor advocate. He reviews Fjällräven’s press centre, noting its graphic‑rich releases that feel more like advertising than traditional corporate news, and points out the regularity of updates and the spotlight on sustainability leaders. The episode shifts to the tactile in‑box flyer that comes with each Kånken, which contains a concise founder narrative (1960 basement start‑up by Åke Nordin) and a product story that frames the backpack as a solution to a 1970s back‑pain epidemic among Swedish schoolchildren. Jim maps this narrative onto his “storification” framework—Opportunity‑But‑Therefore—showing how the brand identified a health problem, offered a simple functional design, and positioned children as the heroes. He ties these observations back to practical PR advice: use authentic brand purpose, embed sustainability, craft clear founder and user stories, and let product benefits solve a real‑world problem. The episode concludes with a call to action to subscribe, join the Speak PR masterclass, and apply the Kånken storytelling lessons to one’s own business.
Chapters
Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is the podcast for anyone who has value locked up in their organization. They're just looking for cost-effective and simple ways to share that. I've been running my own companies for over 25 years, including an international public relations company. So I like to share on this podcast insights and tools and technologies that I know will work. Today I'm going to look at the brand Fjällräven as a little bit of a case study because We've just been convinced to buy one for our daughter. Now this is the Swedish brand of outdoor clothing and backpacks. I hadn't, to be honest, heard of the brand before, but it is the brand of choice in my daughter's school. So I thought I'd just have a look at what went behind this amazing word of mouth that got us to pay £85 for a school backpack. Actually, on results, it really looks like a very good piece of kit. So we're very happy. With our Kanken backpack. Now, the Kanken backpack, if you were to look for it online, you'll find that there are over 5,937 reviews on Google as of today for this backpack. That's where I first start to check out the reviews of beyond my daughter, what people think of it. And with the exception of one person who complained about the zips, everybody else is glowing as a 4.7 rating review. Now, these backpacks are not cheap. As I've mentioned, and if you've got nearly 6,000 people reviewing it and all of them nearly with a 5-star, then that's got to be saying something good about the product. So in our Speak PR course, we talk about converting people from being unaware about our products and services to becoming evangelists, and plainly that is what the Fahl Raven people in Sweden have managed to do with their products and services. So then I had a look at the website because that's, I guess, an occupational hazard. Now inside the website, when you first get there, top left on the navigation bar is sustainability, and it's pictures of walking in the countryside, young people hiking, and then these Kanken family bags. It says meet the family. Meet the Kenken family. Very early on, the brand is showing and talks about what they do, and they say in their mission that they develop functional, durable, and timeless outdoor gear. They act responsibly towards nature, animals, and people, and they inspire and develop interest in outdoor life. Sounds fairly familiar, actually, doesn't it? But what I also liked about what they said their website was that we've been trekking for more than 50 years. I hope we never get there. So this is the beginnings for me of the storification part of Speak PR. They're starting to build the brand promise around the brand that is really speaking not just about the product but around the ethos of the company. So When we look at the website, sustainability is nearly 15% of the homepage. They've got a whole section on sustainability on the homepage. They've got information about the materials that they use, but also interestingly enough, they've got an area on their outdoor adventures and they have the Fjällräven Polar, the Classic, the Fox Trade Block, and also the Arctic Fox Initiative, which is where they're working to safeguard Arctic Fox. So they're not only creating products, but they're very much obviously part of the sustainability scene. And when I look at their press section, which again is what we're talking about on this podcast, is about public relations and how people communicate that, their press center is for me excellent, not least because it has Releases almost every month, pretty regularly. But each release has a very nice header, which is a graphic, which has then a headline in it. So it's really more like an advertising area than a traditional press area. They are talking about the materials and the people that make this brand Far Raven work. And they talk about how, for example, their head of sustainability, Christiana Dolva Thornberg, was awarded the Businesswoman of the Year in the Swedish sport industry. So they're really showing that they're active, and all the pictures are of people wearing the equipment, the clothing, and so on, in and around the environments they should be. So really not feeling corporate at all. The products, if you're interested, are not cheap. The trousers, anything from £120 to £400 for a pair of expedition trousers. So this is obviously at the top end of products for the outdoors. So we were sold, of course, by this stage. My daughter, the reviews, checking the website and looking at the kind of ethos of the company. Then we bought the lilac purple bag for my daughter, and inside the bag there's a very nice folded flyer. Now it's an A4 piece of paper which is folded into quarters, so you get a very nice A5 size flyer with a nice picture of the backpack. And the paper does not look varnished or glossy, it looks slightly yellowed. And when we open it up to be a full A4 size, we see the— must have been the founder Okay, and there's a story in here of Falraven. It says in 1960, Acker Nordin founded Falraven in the basement in the Swedish town Ornsköldsvik. So apologies to anyone in Sweden listening to that pronunciation. But since then, we've stayed true to our mission, developing timeless, functional, and durable outdoor equipment, acting responsibly towards humans, animals, and nature. And inspiring people to spend time outdoors. There's a wonderful picture of obviously the founder with a lightweight backpack that I presumed they had invented the frame on the backpack with the tent, obviously in a field of some sort. And the the whole feeling of the literature is that it's very tactile. Not sell at all. But then on the reverse side, there is the story of Kanken, the product. And this, I think, is worth highlighting because we talk in the Speak PR program about the storification. What is the narrative behind the business that you set up? And here they have it. They have on the left-hand side of the page, they have 3 kids going off on their bikes Slightly dirty, dark, grainy photograph, and they have what is evidently a teacher at school. And it says here that there's a story. It says, "The backpack that straightened out a whole generation." And I'll read just a slight bit to you. It says, "At the end of the 1970s, new statistics showed that up to 80% of the Swedish population at some point suffered from back pain." And these problems were appearing in the increasingly younger age groups. At this time, shoulder bags were popular. However, experts believe that the load from school bags and schoolbooks could be redistributed from one shoulder to both, the risk of back pain would be greatly reduced. So that's setting up in our opportunity-but-therefore framework of storification. The opportunity is that there would be no back pain. That people could carry product, carry books without suffering any long-term pain. The but is that the shoulder bags were not working, and this is the therefore. An idea that carried weight is the next subheader. Our founder, Acker Nordin, was following the back debate with great interest, and with the help of the Swedish Guide and the Scout Association, immediately sketched an affordable Functional backpack with plenty of space for school children's books and binders. This was introduced at Kanken in 1978. The weight of the bag was redistributed from a single shoulder to both shoulders. Back problems diminished. It was also asserted that the backpack was good for posture. Now, one wouldn't imagine it's a very complicated story. It's not a high-tech story. In fact, it's a very logical. Solution to a very simple practical issue. But the way that it's been written is very engaging, very simple, and very, uh, and very easy to understand. And within just one A4 piece of paper that was inside my daughter's backpack, I've understood the narrative behind the company and the solution that the founder of the Fjällräven company found to people having one-shoulder backpacks. So I raise this because in our Speak PR program, we talk about getting back to the person. Who is it that invented this? What is their backstory, if you pardon the pun? But also, who are the people that we are trying to make into the heroes of the story? In this case, it's the children. We're trying to help the children to carry their books to school without pain. And of course, that's been the motivation for me to get my daughter a new backpack. You want something that can contain a backpack, contain a laptop, some books, water, is durable, also a little bit fashionable and trendy, easily carried both as a backpack and also as a little briefcase. So as we look at our own company, what do we have as a backstory? Pardon the pun again. What do we have as a story? What do we have as a narrative? Why did you create this product or service? What problem were you trying to solve? And therefore, which heroes have you created now as a result of the solutions that you found? So moving on from the sort of theory that I've been going through a lot with the Speak Pier, I decided I would start to highlight some case studies because one thing to know the theory, but it's another to start to see how other people have been applying that. And this case of the Fjällräven backpack, the Kanken, since 1978, still going strong. And as they say in the brochure, it hasn't really changed since. It's still a good product, so why change it? And if that's the story behind your product, don't be ashamed. Be proud of the successes it's got and the enduring success. So with that, I'd like to say thank you for listening to this episode of Speak Pure. I hope that this little vignette, this little case study, will maybe shed some light on a problem you're trying to solve. And help you to get noticed. My name is Jim James. If you like this, please do subscribe or share this podcast. Also, you can come to our website esospr.com to subscribe to our newsletter. And if you're interested in a masterclass and a mastermind where I work with you and a small number of other people on developing your own narrative and your own plan to get noticed, come to speakpr.co where where we've listed out all the materials and the subscription forms to join the next mastermind. Thank you for listening, and until we're together again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on telling stories so that you can get noticed in a sustainable way.
