This year's spring/winter market is over. We have interviewed a few sellers about their experiences from the Lycksele market.

Marja Skum, Ammarnäs, 1st year
The main product is Suovasgáhkku, a mixture of lightly smoked reindeer meat and root vegetables served in homemade bread. Part of the concept is also a heated Lapp cot, where you can sit down and be served. They also sell ready-packed meat and some handicraft products. So far she feels that everything is positive. She has no particular expectations but hopes, first of all, that she'll make both ends meet.

Musu Joseph/Big Mama, Lycksele, 1st year
A group of women, headed by Big Mama, cook and sell West African food. Things have turned out better than expected, and people are very positive.

Aili Isaksson, Luleå, 3rd year
The best-sellers of Aili's Pottery are a specially designed vase and a wall lantern for tin candles. Aili thinks she is doing all right, but with 30 years' experience from the Jokkmokk market, she feels that this market is a bit slower. She thinks that Lycksele should do better marketing all over the country.

Maj-Lis Palmebjörk, Lycksele, 3rd year
Maj-Lis is selling matted wool products, and this is her third year as a market seller. Business is becoming better and better. Matted slippers is her best-seller. People's reactions are both positive and negative, but mostly positive. What has made her pleasantly surprised is the great knowledge among the visitors to the market about wool and matting.

Tommy Stenman, Storuman, 4th year
Sales for Fiskehörnan (Angling Corner) are really revved up.
We are allowed to ask a few questions, if we promise to be quick about it. He would have been here much earlier, if it had not been so difficult to get a stall. His best-sellers are the sea angling kits, but he is selling everything for summer as well as winter angling. He describes the market atmosphere as "swell".

Erik Söderlund, Lyckan, 6th year
Lyckan's Butcher's is selling elk meat products. Mainly, this is a matter of making oneself seen among people and thus advertise the company. Erik likes the pleasant market atmosphere.

E. Tepsa, Övertorneå, 10th year
This is an enterprise, selling food that can be consumed straight off: Finnish sausages and fried Baltic herring. They like the market atmosphere here, and their sales have been constant through the years. "Everybody has to eat, don't they?"

Louise Kärrman, Knaften, 14th year
Louise bought her confectionery factory from its founder, Ove Sohlberg, and has moved it from Hedlunda to Knaften. They make and sell all their confectionery themselves, apart from a small part. Their best-sellers are peppermint rock and soft chocolate nougat. People are very keen on buying local produce, and that means a lot. Louise fells that she has to work a lot more for the money these days. Her sales figures do not increase as much as her expenses.

Janne Pettersson, 15th year
Janne is the only basketwork dealer north of Markaryd but started here by selling table-cloths. For seven years he has now sold basketwork. Sales have dropped a little year after year, and he thinks that one of the reasons may be the recent establisment of new shops here. The atmosphere is good, and the Lycksele nightlife has gradually calmed down but is still very noisy compared to other places. He thinks that Lycksele should go in more for marketing and support activities.

Said Touati, Skellefteå, 30th year
Dellys is the name of the business. They focus on quality and helpfulness and notice that this makes their customers come back. We have regular customers that we expect to come, but sales are not as intensive as they used to be. The markets used to be a meeting-place in other ways with family reunions, dancing and parties. It is not so any more. Other negative factors for profits are that prices for fuel and rents for stalls have gone up.

Ove Sohlberg, Lycksele, 35th year
Noe Ove is selling bread, herring, sausages, coconut snowballs etc., of which the best-seller is herring. He likes the good market atmosphere but thinks that there is too much boozing and noise in the evenings and at nights.

When he sarted as a market seller, the market was much smaller. It was limited to the main street between Coop and the pharmacy, where there was a single row of stalls along the street, and a small concentration in the square. Then there was mostly sweets and knick-knacks. Ove was the one who started up a confectionery factory at Hedlunda. Then he travelled all the way from southern Sweden to sell sweets at the Lycksele market, and he felt he had better start a local factory, and so he did. Later on he sold his factory to Louise Kärrman (above).

Hasse Bentgson "Wild Hasse", 40th year
Wild Hasse's company, Fjällprodukter, keeps on selling reindeer and elk sausages, meat and bread with the reindeerr sausages as the best-seller. Sales are improving for each year. Something special and imposrtant with the markets are the evenings together with the other sellers in caravans, restaurants and cafés. Then there is singing, music and story-telling, "and there your soul is turned inside out". In earlier days people met for the same reason around campfires, but at cold temperatures the evenings, of course, became very short. Now there is a multitude of nationalities. Then it was Lapps, Finns and Swedes. Now there are caravans, minibuses and mobile phones. Then there were cars of inferior quality, that were driven with the load on roof-racks or in the boot, and petrol was 0.35 SEK/litre. A hotel room was 50 SEK per night, and 100 sellers had to share two pay-phones and two hotel telephones.