As Swedish as I and the Mum­my­Mug™ are, we also have another root, namely the region of Twente in the East of the Netherlands.

Why there, you would think? Well, you are look­ing at yet another lovepat; as I fol­lowed my Dutch hus­band Han back to live in his home town Haaks­ber­gen in 2007. Haaks­ber­gen and Twente  is thus where I started devel­op­ing my idea for the Mum­my­Mug™. As a new arrival in a new coun­try, I lit­er­ally had to start from the begin­ning: learn­ing the lan­guage, build­ing my net­work and try to work out how on earth to start the adven­ture of trans­lat­ing the idea for the prod­uct con­cept Mum­my­Mug™ to a real product.

Today, the regional news­pa­per Tuban­tia has pub­lished a fan­tas­tic fea­ture arti­cle on Mum­my­Mug™. It is unfor­tu­nately not avail­able online, as it has been placed in their spe­cial peri­od­i­cal De Onderne­mer (‘The Entre­pre­neur’). I take it as a great honor: not only is it great pub­lic­ity, it is — know­ing the Twents cul­ture — a real token of recog­ni­tion. And in Twente, it takes time and effort for a new­comer to earn his or her place.

You see: liv­ing in Twente is not just liv­ing in yet another part of the King­dom of the Nether­lands.  It is liv­ing in Twente.  This region and its proud inhab­i­tants, call­ing them­selves Tukkers, really have a sense of spe­cial com­mu­nity and many have lived here for gen­er­a­tions. There is even such a thing as a move­ment for the Free Repub­lic of Twente (in Dutch) — that  even hands out Twentse pass­ports to peo­ple who swear alle­giance to the Twentse flag. Yep, this is pos­si­ble in a coun­try like the Nether­lands, built on the prin­ci­ples of accep­tance and lib­erty. The Tukkers speak a spe­cial dialect — Twents — that really is so dif­fer­ent in vocab­u­lary and pro­noun­ci­a­tion from  reg­u­lar Dutch, that it is dif­fi­cult for some­one who has learned reg­u­lar Dutch to  under­stand it. And no won­der: an online dic­tio­nary of Twents count almost 1,700 spe­cific Twentse words!

So in today’s blog, I want to return the favour: I am also very proud of Twente!

The first per­son I came in con­tact with was Mar­tin Gre­vers, who designed the con­cept of the Mum­my­Mug™. Read more about this cre­ative inven­tor and our coop­er­a­tion here. Dur­ing an inten­sive first year of prod­uct devel­op­ment, I also got to know a range of other cre­ative part­ners, such as the design bureau Indes in Enschede, teach­ers at the Indus­trial Design Depart­ment at Sax­ion Hogeschool and at Tech­nis­che Uni­ver­siteit Twente , and sup­port and advice from the Indus­trial design Cen­tre that have helped me come in con­tact with the right peo­ple at the right moment. I even got per­sonal advice more than once from the Mayor of Enschede, Mr Peter Den Oud­sten.

Wher­ever I have come, I have felt the cre­ative and entre­pre­neur­ial spirit of Twente and am very grate­ful for the con­tri­bu­tions of all part­ners that have helped and encour­aged me along the way. With­out the warm wel­come that Twente offered to a newly arrived Swedish woman with not much more than a good idea in her pocket, the Mum­my­Mug™ would prob­a­bly never have got­ten off the ground. And although I am based in The Hague nowa­days, I go to Twente often and still work reg­u­larly with my Twentse partners.

Thus — I’m proud to say, on behalf of Mum­my­Mug™: Wij Zijn Tukkers — and proud of it!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you sub­scribe to my RSS feed!