That was uncomfortably icky. And yet, it’s impossible to turn away.

Well played, HeimatTBWA in Berlin! You’ve turned our tummy a bit. But this work emerges as one of the most notably weird commercials in recent memory. (The client-agency team has a history with the strange visuals and surreal situations.)

Traktor directed through Stink Films. The spot breaks today across European markets.

What if your entire day, indeed your whole life, took place in spaces measuring one square meter? This is the case for the hero of HeimatTBWA’s latest visual stunner from Hornbach.

At the start of the :60 below, he awakens in a constricted world. He climbs a narrow passage with toast in his mouth. It’s a scene akin to Alice falling into Wonderland, but in reverse. He stops to spritz his mushrooms. Under a low slanted roof, he tries his hand at pottery. Then he slides away from the wheel, creation in hand, to savor a meal with company. The uneven pot now holds flowers.

The vibe’s claustrophobic and dreamlike. Stuff slides about, scenes shift in odd ways.

The ad is a creative response to the cost-of-living crisis that’s spread like a plague, making it harder to find adequate living space. “A square meter seems small, yet it is an endless space of ideas,” the YouTube description reads. And indeed, as the man progresses through spaces he lives in and shares, the walls never exceed that measure (a square meter is about 10.76 square feet).

Hornbach’s grittiness manifests beautifully here, and that madcap quality we’ve come to love shines in the protagonist’s eyes. But the subtle hand of Heimat can also be felt, which is what gives the DIY shop its unique brand identity: It’s a place for creativity unhinged, the stuff of too much time alone with a hammer, staring at something whose “artistic constraints” have begun to drive you a little mad—enough to push past barriers of convention.

You’ll find no neat Ikea aesthetics, clean lines interrupted only by the quirky accent marks of the furniture’s Swedish names. Instead, Hornbach’s world is rooty, wild, imperfect—a garden gone full English.

“We want to encourage and inspire people to creatively rethink and design rooms and spaces, both within their own four walls and beyond,” explains Thomas Schnaitmann, Hornbach’s head of international brand. “Particularly in places where affordable living space is becoming scarcer, the number of ideas per square meter needs to be even bigger.”

The work is fun to watch, each scene opening like a palimpsest you can live in, revealing layer upon layer of life. It must have been fun to make. Director Steve Rogers of TDF Berlin worked with set designer Steven Jones-Evans, whose team handcrafted everything you see.

“This film is the embodiment of the Hornbach brand. We’ve built everything by hand, from the bed to the vertical dining room. No special effects, only ideas,” says Guido Heffels, agency founder and CCO. 

The results speak for themselves. In a well-shot minute, the rooms we move through are compact while conveying scale. The ambiance possesses a liminal quality: Space seems to go on forever, holding endless potential. But it also feels a little too tight, evoking the times we’ve had to make do in tight quarters.

At the end of the ad, the protagonist tumbles out of the labyrinth and emerges, as though from the head of John Malkovich, onto a stage before an applauding audience. The background brasses play at their peak. This line appears: “Every square meter deserves to be the best in the world.”

Designers and artists from eight European countries—including Germany, Sweden, Slovakia, Austria, and the Netherlands—produced actual square-meter artworks for the supporting campaign, which will roll out from mid-September onward. They have evocative names like “The Square Farm,” “The Memory Room” and “BBQ Tower.” Their stories, and those of their designers, will also be told on social and digital supports.

Out-of-home, radio and event promotions will accompany the work.

CREDITS

Creative Agency: HeimatTBWA
Media Agency: Mediaplus
Director: Steve Rogers
Music Composition: Benjamin Woodgates, LELAND Music, London
Music Supervision: Ed Bailie, LELAND Music, London
Sound Design: David Arnold/ LOFT Berlin
Film Production: TPF Berlin
Producers: Michael Duttenhöfer, Florian von der Heydt

Spring is here! And Hornbach says hello with an ad as offbeat as we’ve come to expect from them.

Created by Heimat Berlin with production by Stink, “Unleashed” is a two-minute romp through suburbia as the local truants turn it upside-down. 

In this case, though, the bad seeds are literally plants. They’ve stolen their negligent owner’s car and are joyriding—scaring the local fauna, knocking over trash cans, vomiting excess matter into alleyways, and picking up hitchhikers—as they make for the nearest Hornbach. 

The spot ends with the tagline, “Come to Hornbach. Before your garden does.”

“Unleashed” is a playful nudge about springtime responsibilities for gardeners or plant people. Now is the time to replant if necessary, refresh beds, fertilize, prune with love, remove old plants before they drop seeds, and introduce new ones before you need them.

It’s the frisky season! And if you can’t be trusted to ensure your pollinating pals are at their finest, well … they’ll just steal your car. Self-care’s a real priority these days.

“Each new campaign is an obligation for us to add a new, remarkable chapter for customers to the book of the Hornbach brand,” says Thomas Schnaitmann, Hornbach’s head of brand international. “Always the project construction market at its core, always unexpected and fresh in its packaging.”

In December, Hornbach’s “From You” offered up the silent but relatable frustrations of DIYers who’ve finished a project, only to discover there’s some minor, maddening thing wrong with it. That ad ended in a way that felt especially appropriate for the holiday season: It’s the artistic quality of errors, or your imperfect fixes, that serve as your gift to the creation.

The difference in tone between that work and this one is striking, but only if you don’t know the brand that well. Hornbach has a talent for sudden swings, like your really random friend. It’s given us DIY contemporary art with Ai Weiwei, the tragicomedy of a shrunken man, and an incredibly zen public toilet, among other things (who will ever forget this classic? Or this one?).

But the red thread is its sense of heart. There’s lots of reasons you may be engaging in DIY, fix-it or gardening work; certainly the pandemic has broadened interest for such projects. Whatever the reasons, you kind of want it all to matter when it’s done, or even in the doing. So a lot of its previous ads have been about catharsis, or fantasy, or locating some inner wild version of yourself.

“Unleashed” is about the other side of that coin: responsibility. When you invest this much time, care and effort into your environment, you’ve got something more than a hobby; it’s a relationship, a conversation. Unsurprisingly, the things you’ve begun interacting with start expecting things from you.

This is clearest in the lyrics of the ad’s hair-metal-inspired song: “Fertilize us. Respect us!”

“Unleashed” will appear on TV in iterations of varied sizes, and in theaters. It’s supported by a series of 15-second ads:

“Special Effects?!” is a fictionalized interview with the ad’s director.
“Divas on Set” reveals the director’s travails with feckless talent.

The last three ads swing away from “behind the scenes” and do some kind of corny, but acceptable, scary story thing instead. The pitch is, some looming thing scares a plant, but it actually turns out to be lovely.

“The Rake of the Night”
“Scissors or Horror”
“Fertilizer in the Dark”

CREDITS

Campaign: “Unleashed”
Spot name: “Come to HORNBACH. Before your garden does.” 
Media (international): cinema, TV, OOH (18/1, CLP, DOOH, ambient), social media, POS, radio, website, banners

Timeframe: 
From March 18, the teaser phase of the campaign starts in the DACH region. 
The official campaign launch is then on March 26. 
Other regions will follow.

Agency: Heimat Berlin
Production: Stink Berlin
Director: Traktor
Music: Finger Music and Sound Design
Sound Design: David Arnold (LOFT)

The work ends with the slogan: “It seems impossible. Until you do it.”

Hornbach says its goal was to put emphasis on courage and facing challenges in a time when fear and worry are more top of mind. 

“The positive power that is generated by completing a project has never been as valuable as it is right now,” says Thomas Schnaitmann, who manages Hornbach’s brand activities. “That sense of achievement after having created something with your own hands is enduring and emboldens people to take on further challenges.”

It’s a short, self-contained piece of work. But it also harks back to something that’s lived in Hornbach’s marketing DNA for as long as we can remember: the notion that a fundamental wildness or warrior spirit inherent to us manifests when we engage in DIY projects (because where else is it going to go?).

But Hornbach and Heimat also have a strong sense of the sublime. “Place of Silence” managed to be both funny and meditative, and when last we encountered the pair, they was making contemporary art with activist artist Ai Weiwei.

You can see some of that elaborate depth in even this tiny piece of work. On top of tapping the highly decorated Kuntz, camera duties were managed by Hoyte van Hoytema, who worked on Tenet, Interstellar and the Bond movie Spectre. Untold London handled digital post-prod, with music from 2Wei and the production oversight of Michael Duttenhöfer, with help from TPF.

“Organizing a mammoth project of this kind, during the coronavirus pandemic, is definitely on a par with the pluckiness of our DIY hero … arranging coronavirus tests for everyone involved in the shoot, having reduced personnel on the set, taking everyone’s temperature, constantly making fine adjustments from a distance,” observes Heimat founder Guido Heffels. 

“But then, anything is possible when you actually do it—with courage and a level head.”

The ad went live on Sept. 17, on televisions and online in Germany. It airs from Sept. 18 in Austria, and will also appear in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, Romania, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

CREDITS

Agency: HEIMAT Berlin 
Production: Tony Petersen 
Film Berlin Director: Tom Kuntz 
Music: 2WEI 
Sound design: Loft Tonstudios GmbH

“I don’t think art would necessarily make the world a better place. But I do think art can make a human being become a better human,” Ai Weiwei says. 

Safety Jackets Zipped the Other Way is composed of safety jackets joined by their zippers—a soft, shapeless sculpture that undermines their utility. A publication, available on Hornbach’s online shop for 18€ (nearly $20), includes building instructions, a certificate of authenticity, an interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, and a classification of how this work fits into Ai Weiwei’s practice. Or you can download the instructions themselves for free. 

The work was created by Neutral Zurich and Heimat Berlin, whose stuff for Hornbach has captivated us for years. For a while, Hornbach was hilarious burly naked men who enjoy struggle. This picture evolved: “Smashing the Clichés” showed Hornbach was for women, too, but that it also understood that women make and unmake under very different conditions than men do. Werkstück Edition showed us design savvy and a subversive streak: Build your own Scandi-style furniture, like Ikea but upscale. And “Place of Silence,” its surreal public toilet installation, showed us poetry, an artistic bent, and that trademark dark humor, ever lingering under the surface.

So there’s a pleasing coherence to this collab with Ai Weiwei, who isn’t just an artist but an activist. Guido Heffels, Heimat’s co-founder and chief creative officer, was nice enough to answer a few questions from us about it.

Muse: Guido, let’s start with what seems like the most obvious question. Why?

Guido Heffels: Far more important—why not? The Ai Weiwei project is not one of these “contemporary” campaigns that are based on data analysis and ambitious market research. The outcome is therefore raw, fresh, unexpected—and puts Hornbach on a totally new level. It feels in retrospect worth us investing a little bit of time for this. Shouldn’t this be the reason why agencies get hired and paid?

Was there a brief? If so, what was the ask? If not, how do you collaborate/conceive ideas with Hornbach these days?

Besides the usual briefs, such as the next spring or autumn campaign, there is something I call the permanent brief—aka, the Phantom Protocol. What else can we do to illustrate what Hornbach, together with their customers, is capable of? What can we do to make Hornbach stand out in a market that is highly competitive? Intuition, based on a deep, meaningful love for a brand, is the key.

We’ve seen Hornbach’s quirky sense of humor, but we’ve also seen it flirt with art, high-end design, pop culture and activism—as in “Smashing the Clichés.”

At the core of it all, carved in stone, there is our prayer, “Creating greatness with your own bare hands.” Whatever adds to this can be the basis for an upcoming Hornbach campaign. This is what all work we created for Hornbach during the last 20 years has in common.

Is there a larger brand ethos at work?

The styles and executions may vary; it’s better to say they have to vary. Otherwise it won’t be a surprise. Do not forget the influence of the directors, artists we work with. They add a lot to the source code of our ideas. And we welcome it. These part time relationships make us learn—and always make us smarter.

We do not send storyboards with frame objectives out to directors, nor do we send prefabricated Photoshop orgies to photographers. Instead we usually start with a clear and precise definition of our goals. We do this for a pure, selfish end in itself, as we ourselves love to explore what constitutes someone else’s vision.

While it’s easy to make the connection between a DIY art project and a DIY store, it’s not quite so natural to associate contemporary art, like Ai Weiwei’s, with the target of a hardware store. Why this match?

They’re both DIY, and I always considered all DIY enthusiasts as artists. An empty white room is their canvas, an attic is a space yet to be discovered: You can turn it into anything. A garden is a wasteland before you turn it into something that clearly says, “This is my way of doing it; this land belongs to me.” Isn’t this what art should be about?

Of course, you need the right tools, the right material, immediate availability, the best quality, fair prices. That’s where Hornbach comes in. And by the way, artwork in most cases consists of simple materials, such as paint or metal or wood. Stuff you can find at every European Hornbach store.

What does the Ai Weiwei work for Hornbach say to you personally?

I don’t want to bore anyone with my personal interpretation of the work itself. The most important and obvious aspect for me is democratic art. Ai Weiwei called it art that is no longer limited to museums or art collectors. For me, his soft sculpture can start a revolution, the disruption of how we perceive and consume art.

How do you hope this work will express itself to the people you’re trying to reach?

There is always a certain expectation when it comes to Hornbach advertising. Whatever we do needs to surprise, entertain, inspire and, in equal measure, add new aspects and extensions to the Hornbach brand. “Really? Ai Weiwei for a DIY brand? Must be Hornbach, right?”

Any fun behind-the-scenes stories you can share?

All the projects we came up with over the last few years took us at least six months each, and for each piece of the Werkstück Edition series, even a year. This process includes the usual ups and downs, frustrations and near-death experiences, followed by exuberant happiness. 

To be honest, this is why I love our job so much. 

What don’t we already know about this campaign that you think we should?

There is an endless list of people and collaborators involved in this project, not only us: NEUTRAL from Zürich who fixed the deal; LIESEL, our Heimat-owned film production company; DATA-ORBIT from St. Gallen, responsible for the book design; Hendrik Becker, Jessica Hartley, Fabian Greitemann, Florian Moser, Julian Stahl, MEDIAPLUS.

CREDITS

Campaign: Ai Weiwei & HORNBACH
Media: Digital (moving image, display, social media), TV, cinema, building instructions, poster
Period: From 13 February 2020 online in Germany, Switzerland and Austria
Agencies: Heimat Berlin and Neutral Zurich
Production: LIESEL
Design (manual/publication): Data-Orbit 

It’s sort of gorgeous, and vaguely porny, just in terms of how into its own idea it is. Users enter barefoot, bathed in ambient purple light, feet in direct contact with cool flat slabs of stone. An artful set of panels is set up like a series of fans before them; when they pee (or the alternative), the panels light up with accompanying visuals and sounds. 

“Like surfing through your bowels!” one woman exclaims. 

One hundred guests were invited to take the throne and share their experiences, including the aforementioned “intestines therapist,” a scientist, a naturopath and different members of the public. 

“It was important to us to portray the process of going to the toilet as an act of physical and mental contemplation, as well as spiritual cleansing,” says Corbinian Hennies, creative director at Heimat.

“It was equally important to depict digestion as a creative process, in order to break down inhibitions and start the dialogue. To this end, we built the toilet to resemble an altar in a cathedral.” 

The hope is that people will leave with a sense of reverence for both the work of their bowels and the porcelain bowl that receives it. Ideally, they’ll take those emotions and build their own personal shrines—using materials from Hornbach, of course. 

“By showing what is possible with a little imagination and the Hornbach product range, we want to inspire people to get creative and turn their own toilet into a monument,” says marketing head Thomas Shnaitmann of Hornbach. “The question is: What will you make of your toilet?”

What, indeed? This isn’t Hornbach’s most coherent piece of work, but it certainly met the standard it’s set for thinking outside the box, so to speak.

CREDITS

Campaign: The Hornbach toilet. A monument against silence.
Media (international): digital (video, display, social media), cinema, out-of-home
Agency: Heimat, Berlin
Film-Production: BenteleBecker Bewegtbild GmbH
Set construction, sound design: m box Bewegtbild GmbH
Direction: Jan Hendrik Becker, Ulrich Bentele
Music: Perkypark Musik GmbH (Peter Hayo)