Helsinki, 2007

From left to right, back row: Alex, Matt, Gees, Ed, Steph; From left to right, front row: Jo and Essi

The Indigo Clothing team, set off from our Old Street office (sadly minus Opal) for our annual sales and marketing conference, on a cold December Friday evening. This year’s venue was Helsinki, capital of Finland and home country of Essi (our old client services co-ordinator, who left us this winter to go travelling in Australia and Thailand) and we left the office in a jubilant and Christmassy mood. Little did we know that dramas would start occuring within 20 minutes of leaving!

It all started when we were sitting on the Piccadilly Line, comparing silly passport photos when Matt, Indigo’s inhouse web developer, realised he had left his passport on his desk! Jo dispatched him from the train with concise travel instructions and via the miracle of the Heathrow Express, Matt managed to join us in Terminal One with just 5 minutes to spare!

However, he need not have rushed after all. Three hours later, we were still sitting on the tarmac, the plane having broken down and we finally made our way into a deserted Helsinki airport at 0230! Feeling a little worse for wear, after all the free drinks that evening, we were rudely woken up by a fire-alarm at 1000:

The next day involved a mix of meetings, sleeping, sight-seeing, eating (reindeer based products!) and drinking in some sort of order and suddenly it was over before it started, it was Sunday night and we were flying back to London, with bags stuffed full of Moomin merchandise:

Two days later, the trip seems like a distant memory, except there is a little, hippo like, teddy bear sitting on Jo’s desk, serenely looking over us…