Valco makes good audio products
What's Valco?
Valco is a Finnish headphone company that got started in 2018. The name comes from one of the biggest financial scandals in Finnish history.
The original Valco (1976–1979) was a joint venture between the Finnish state and Japan's Hitachi, supposed to manufacture TV picture tubes. The factory didn't actually produce many picture tubes. What it did produce was Finland's most famous corruption case. Taxpayers lost roughly a billion euros in today's money. A handful of civil servants and a CEO did time. Not a single politician was held accountable, as is tradition.
We have nothing to do with the old Valco. The story is just a good one, and the name happened to be available, since the company went under more than 40 years ago. When we couldn't come up with our own history, we swiped one.
The current Valco was founded by Henri Heikkinen and Jani Rajaniemi. Both were sick of their day jobs and decided to do something of their own. In early 2019, audio guru Jasse "Jazmanaut" Kesti joined the team, and that's when the actual headphone business got rolling.
The VMK20, released in 2020, blew up online. Since then we've made the VMK25, the VMK15, the Nordell speakers, and a few screw-ups too.
During Covid we got a big batch of headphones with faulty memory, which nearly bankrupted the company. We've had supply problems on the regular, and we've had to deal with lawyers more than anyone should. The company is still standing, and the headphones sound good.
Valco's wildly talented founders are humble guys who enjoy life's simple pleasures, like sports cars, absurdly large gold watches, yachting in the Mediterranean, and private-jet drinking trips. Which is why they prefer to stay in the background and let the magnificent Raimo Valcosen be the public face of Valco.
Valco is the world's friendliest evil corporation.
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Valco's official mission is to sell enough noise cancelling headphones to build a Death Star. (Not affiliated with The Walt Disney Company.)
We're still pretty far from that target. A big chunk of the money goes to beer, fast cars, oversized watches and child support payments. Whatever's left goes into the Death Star fund.
In the meantime, we make headphones that sound good and survive being used. If something breaks, we'll fix it. Our repair team in Kajaani handles that, powered by cigarettes, coffee and mid-strength lager.
We're probably the only headphone maker in the world that takes your old pair as trade-in toward a new one. Throwing things away is dumb, and we've grown a sentimental attachment to our own products over the years.
We plant a tree for every pair of headphones sold. Is that greenwashing? Of course it is. The trees still grow, even if the motive is questionable.
You can write to us, and we'll write back. Personally. No "you are ticket number 4859395", no "your message is important to us". An actual human replies, who might be in a bad mood but replies anyway.
Who on earth is Raimo?
You may have run into a strange character in Valco's ads.
Raimo Valconen is the human face of Valco. He's our more-or-less fictional CEO, who dreams of his own Death Star and a W123 Mercedes.
Neither exists yet.
He's a bit like Ronald McDonald, only less terrifying.
Below is Raimo's debut from 2021. There's more on YouTube, in case your life has a Raimo-shaped hole in it.
Valco is a fully Finnish company
The people behind Valco
Unlike a lot of evil corporations, Valco is run by actual human beings whose entire livelihood depends on you buying a pair of headphones or a speaker. They have names, faces and opinions, some of which are bad.
Meet them below.
Henri
The supremely talented Henri is one of Valco's two founders.
He's responsible for everything you actually see. Including this website and this very text, but also the marketing, the products, the manuals and pretty much all other content.
Henri is lazy by nature and would much rather be travelling, eating well and sitting in the sun, but can't, because the others keep cracking the whip. He hates winter and remote hermit cabins.
Jani
Jani is Valco's other founder. He holds a doctorate in administrative sciences, specialising in innovation and organisations.
He's extremely smart, but also a deeply lazy and antisocial hermit who mostly hangs out at his cabin and hates all other humans. At Valco, Jani mainly drinks cognac and quotes famous philosophers.
Jasse
Jasse "Jazmanaut" Kesti is the audio wizard behind Valco's sound quality. He's a studio and audio engineer, system designer, musician, sound designer and composer, to name a few. Jasse is, genuinely, an absolute genius.
For the past 25 years he has mastered and mixed the music of top artists (and also some considerably less top ones), so he knows exactly what music is supposed to sound like from the musician's point of view. With his help, we've been able to tune the headphones so they actually sound good.
Hannes
Hannes has built Valco a fast and properly functional repair service, which is why our headphones tend to last considerably longer than the competition's.
Maybe the best feedback we get is when a customer is angry with us because the headphones came back so fast that nothing could possibly have been done to them. And in that time, our repair team has actually fixed them.
Jukka
Jukka joined Valco to run sales, which is the kind of job where you actually have to deal with people. Excellent news for us, because Jani hates humans and Henri is too lazy to pick up the phone.
Poor Jukka found himself unemployed after selling his own company. Since we have a habit of taking in unfortunate cases like this, we brought him on board. To be fair, Jukka is a seasoned entrepreneur who's been knocking around the business world for over 20 years.
HeCe
HeCe is Henri's personal therapy animal and Valco's official travelling man. His actual job description has never really been defined, because he's always in Istanbul or somewhere similar.
Every now and then he picks up the phone and says something wise. Sometimes not. We're not entirely sure what HeCe does at Valco, but his presence calms Henri down, and that alone is reason enough to pay him a salary.