Vera Nettebrock builds haircare brand on TikTok, Helsinki founder reaches million-euro sales

• Finland-Swedish founder Vera Nettebrock started with a personal haircare problem and built her own product.
• According to Hufvudstadsbladet, the company reached million-euro turnover within three years.
• TikTok gave the brand a faster route to customers than traditional retail distribution.
• Nettebrock says repeat purchases depend on trust, putting product performance ahead of one-off viral reach.

Three years after mixing a solution to her own haircare problem, Helsinki founder Vera Nettebrock is running a company with million-euro turnover and has been named Helsinki’s young entrepreneur of the year. Writing in Hufvudstadsbladet, the newspaper reports that TikTok became the shortcut that pushed her haircare business from a personal fix into a paying customer base.

The detail that stands out is less the product than the route to market. Nettebrock did not begin with a supermarket listing, a pharmacy chain or the usual Nordic startup script of grants, incubators and conference panels. She found an audience where people already demonstrate products on their own hair, compare results on camera and punish weak claims quickly. A small consumer brand can buy a first click, but not a second order. Nettebrock tells Hufvudstadsbladet that if a company does not build trust, customers will not buy the product again.

That changes the economics of growth. Traditional retail often demands margins, slotting costs and enough volume to justify shelf space before a brand has learned what customers actually want. Social platforms reverse the sequence: attention comes first, then direct feedback, then repeat sales if the product survives contact with real users. For a founder selling hair oil, that means product demonstrations, comments, before-and-after clips and customer reactions become both advertising and quality control. The customer acquisition channel and the product test happen in the same feed.

It also says something about what the Nordic startup system rewards. Publicly backed startup culture in Finland has long favoured software, deep tech and companies that can speak the language of export platforms and venture rounds. A consumer goods founder selling hair oil online sits outside that prestige hierarchy, even if the cash register is real from day one. Hufvudstadsbladet’s account points to a business built through customer attention and repeat demand rather than institutional validation.

Whether the path is replicable depends on details that matter more than the slogan. TikTok can expose a product cheaply, but beauty and grooming are categories where buyers can see results, compare routines and return for refills. That suits a direct-to-consumer brand better than many other goods. The harder part is the one Nettebrock describes plainly: trust has to survive the first purchase. Viral reach can move inventory for a week. Hair oil that people reorder can pay salaries.

For now, the concrete facts are modest and hard to dismiss: one founder in Helsinki, one product she could not find on the market, and three years later a business measured in millions rather than likes.

Källor: Hufvudstadsbladet