Germund Paaer served as Kalevala Koru's first chief designer. It can be said that Kalevala Koru was, in the beginning, as much Paaer's creation as it was the company's founding women's. He was responsible for Kalevala Koru's design until 1950, during which time he designed hundreds of different pieces of jewelry for the company. His guiding principle was: "The edges of the jewelry must be perfectly smooth. A woman's delicate fingers touch them, and there must be no unevenness, nor must they ever be sharp!"
Germund Paaer was a talented, enthusiastic, and highly prolific, yet modest, artist. The most popular of his designed pieces of jewelry is Kuutar, which has been produced since the mid-1940s. Other pieces of his jewelry still in the collection include the Salt heart and Teljänneito. In addition to jewelry, he designed over 120 wooden decorative objects for Kalevala Koru's production in the 1940s, creating their designs based on old peasant artifacts.
