After a decade in Framery my journey feels like it’s just beginning

Framery Project Manager Maiju Saarelma shares her passion for problem-solving and how the company helps ambitious people achieve great things as Framery celebrates its 15th anniversary.

October 29, 2025

Although Maiju Saarelma jumped from the corporate to the startup world a decade ago, she feels her journey is just beginning. As Framery celebrates its 15-year anniversary, she talks about her fierce passion for problem solving and why she sees Framery as a place where ambitious people can achieve great things.

Maiju joined Framery seeking new challenges in 2016 after the closure of Microsoft’s mobile phones division, where she had worked as a Mechanical designer. As Project Manager for Framery’s smart pods, she gets hands on with novel concepts and, together with her team, helps to turn them into new products.

Hands-on from day one

Joining Framery from the strict constraints of the corporate world was quite an eye-opening experience for Maiju, who was used to rigid job descriptions and fixed roles. As a product designer at Framery, she had to dive headfirst into inventing new parts and coming up with new ways to do things – after all, the company was essentially creating a new industry from scratch. Although stressful at times, she found her early years at the company as a product designer extremely rewarding. “I found out about Framery through someone I knew who worked here. I contacted them about open positions and that was the start of my journey”, says Maiju.

“I love being a designer because you get to create new products, solve problems, and see the results of your work.”

Continuous improvement is a team effort

As a project manager, Maiju’s days can feel hectic, with meetings and one-on-one sessions with her team on top of her own project work. Leading a team of 12 designers and engineers, her job is to keep everything on track and on schedule – and watch out for any potential obstacles along the way. Despite the fast pace of the work, Maiju and her team’s focus never deviates from continuous improvement – making every Framery product better with each iteration. “Although our smart pods already help millions of people around the world to have a better working day, our goal is to make our products better all the time”, Maiju states.

“Framery pods are constantly evolving, with small adjustments and bigger design changes based on feedback from our customers and new ideas from our team.”

Learning on the job

Bringing the next-generation Framery One to life stands not only as Maiju’s most challenging project in her time with the company, but also as the most educational and rewarding one. She and her team had to continuously break new ground, learning new skills, new manufacturing technologies, and new ways of designing parts under the pressure of a hectic schedule. But knowledge gaps and a steep learning curve simply served to push them to innovate even faster.

Maiju firmly believes that true innovation cannot happen without the freedom to experiment, and that the best solutions often come from a blank slate. For example, with Framery One the R&D team used the car industry as a benchmark, learning how to make deep-drawn parts. The starting point for the team was the appearance – what the product should be – and they then worked together to figure out the technologies needed to make it the best it could be.

A youthful and ambitious company culture

Although she sometimes misses the spontaneous ‘all hands on deck’ nature of her early years at Framery, Maiju feels empowered by the professional and ambitious culture that the company has built.

“In this culture, people get the chance to test ideas that might seem crazy at first and, most importantly, they have a licence to fail while doing so. This creative, ambitious approach has so far led to Framery being granted 60 patents.”

For Maiju, Framery’s powerful combination of deep experience and youthful ambition creates an environment where it always feels like bigger things are just around the corner. The path is a little more predictable these days, but there is still the ‘have-a-go’ attitude and the opportunity to push the boundaries, especially in her work in R&D.

“Framery is a place where young, talented people can achieve great things if they are motivated and bold.”

“From the start, the founders set their sights on making Framery the best in the world at what we do. You can see the same boldness and commitment to excellence in the new people that join our journey”, says Maiju.

The journey is just beginning

Despite having spent a decade with Framery, Maiju feels that her journey is really just beginning. Things are still getting bigger and better all the time, but there is a somewhat calmer nature to her work. She and her team are united by a can-do attitude and a commitment to make Framery’s products the best in the world.