A rare Moomin mug has been sold for €46,023, in what its Finnish seller says is the highest known price ever paid for a single Moomin mug. The Diving with Shells (Uimahyppy simpukoilla) mug was produced only as a small test batch in 2006 and never entered regular production.
The sale was reported by Finnish public broadcaster Yle after Mukilaakso Oy, the company behind the specialist collecting site Muumimukit Rahaksi, announced the transaction in September.
Why this rare Moomin mug is so valuable
The mug looks similar to the regular Diving (Uimahyppy) model released in 2006, but has additional shell and coral motifs.
According to Moomin Arabia’s archive of Moomin mugs, both Diving and Diving with Shells date from 2006. The company told Yle that only a small test batch of the shell-decorated version was produced and that it never went into regular production.
Mukilaakso says only around ten examples are known to have been made.
The rarity has already produced unusually high prices. The company sold another example for around €9,000 in 2019, while a similar mug fetched about €23,000 at a Swedish auction in 2021.
Five bidders offered more than €40,000
The latest sale began with a closed auction in December 2025, while the transaction itself was completed in April 2026.
According to Mukilaakso’s announcement of the sale, five different collectors submitted offers exceeding €40,000.
Mukilaakso CEO Rasmus Rantanen told Yle that the long absence of the mug from public sales helped explain the jump in price. Five years had passed since the previous record sale in Sweden, while interest in collecting Moomin mugs had continued to grow.
“There was a certain kind of pent-up fervour among collectors to get the mug into their collections.”
The company itself had bought the mug in 2025 for €27,000.
The buyer remains unknown
The person who paid €46,023 has not been identified. Mukilaakso described the buyer only as a long-time Moomin collector from the Nordic region, who did not want their name or nationality disclosed.
The company also waited until September to announce the April transaction at the buyer’s request.
Mukilaakso calls the sale a world record for a Moomin mug, although there is no independent register covering every private sale. Rantanen told Yle that, based on the company’s 14 years of buying and selling the mugs and on publicly available information, it is not aware of any example having sold for more.
The price is more than five times what another Diving with Shells mug fetched in 2019 and roughly twice the amount recorded in Sweden in 2021. For one of the rarest pieces produced by Moomin Arabia, several years without a public sale appear to have been enough to turn collector demand into a €46,023 purchase.
