Arabia's vintage Moomin ware: discontinued mugs and how to choose

The Moomin mug people are hunting is usually one they can no longer buy new.

New Arabia Moomin pieces appear almost every year, and others quietly disappear. This is for anyone looking for a discontinued mug, and wondering how this ware got here.

First, the 1950s

Before the main story, one piece.

We have a Moomin figurine made by Signe Hammarsten Jansson — Tove Jansson's mother.

In the 1950s Arabia's Moomin output was not yet a product line in any real sense. Tove made Moomin dishes herself; her mother Signe made ceramic figures. This is from that period: something from well before the ware now in circulation.

Pieces like this turn up at flea markets very occasionally, and no more often than that.

1990: when Moomin ware really began

Moomin tableware is sometimes said to date from the 1950s. That isn't accurate — a handful of works existed, which is a different claim.

In the early 1980s Richard Lindh designed the model for a children's set.

And mass production began in 1990. The first Moomin mug was "The Green Comic Strip", made from 1990 to 1993.

So "vintage Moomin", as collectors mean it, is discontinued stock from the 1990s onward — not 1950s antiques. Get that wrong and you look in the wrong places for the wrong things.

The work of Tove Slotte

The Moomin ware from 1990 onward was drawn by Tove Slotte (born 1957).

She joined Arabia as an in-house designer in 1985 and went freelance in 1993. She made more than a hundred Moomin mugs over about thirty years, and has now retired. The Moomins she drew are not going to increase in number.

Her work was never simple transfer. Tove Jansson's originals sit inside comic-strip frames. To wrap them around a mug or a plate meant completing what wasn't drawn and re-fitting the proportions — without losing the atmosphere of the source. That was the job.

In the summer of 1990 Slotte took the first finished Moomin dishes to Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä. Jansson asked for a colour change on one plate and approved the rest.

What "vintage" means here

Discontinued simply means no longer made.

Seasonal and annual mugs leave the market when their run ends. The further back the release, the harder it is to find. That mechanism is what turned Moomin mugs into collectibles.

Older pieces show variation that current production doesn't: the transfer sitting slightly differently, colour a little stronger or weaker. Traces of how things were made then, rather than faults.

We describe chips, wear and crazing openly on the product page.

The characters

Little My, Moominmamma, Moominpappa, Snufkin.

From our own buying, Moominpappa and Moominmamma turn up relatively often. Little My is popular enough that good examples find owners quickly.

That is a statement about what appears at Swedish flea markets, not about prices in Japan.

Using them

Older mugs often have crazing. Not a crack, but keep them out of the microwave. The same goes for anything with gold decoration. Hand-washing is safer than a dishwasher.