Some places make an impression straight away. Bad Sülze revealed itself more slowly—and then kept surprising us.
Ongoing collaboration since 2023 · Strategy · Creative direction · Community participation · Film · Photography · Design · Project coordination
Surrounded by nature and close to the Baltic Sea, Bad Sülze has clean air, peace and plenty of room to breathe. All of which is lovely. But the real surprise came when we met the people: full of energy, imagination and determination to make things happen. For the past three years, we’ve worked together to make that side of Bad Sülze more visible.
How can a small town become more visible without pretending to be something it isn’t?
We started with the people already shaping the place—and turned their stories, faces and ideas into campaigns, films and public projects.
The town becomes the cast
It began with a music video for the band Duxius. We invited people from across Bad Sülze to take part, and everyone was welcome—even the mayor joined in. The video went on to win the PopFiSH Music Video Award 2025. Not bad for something that started with: ‘Would you like to be in a music video?’
Credits
Director of Photography
Photography
Team Leading
Meet the people
Great characters don’t only live in novels. They live next door. They walk their dogs. They run the local shop. They know things about the town that Google probably doesn’t. You just have to talk to them.
So that’s what we did. We listened to their stories and created a series of portraits showing the real faces of Bad Sülze. Because a town doesn’t always need a new face. Sometimes it simply needs to show the ones it already has.
Credits
Director of Photography
Photography
Team Leading
Put the town on billboards
Billboard campaigns usually feature models pretending to have perfect lives. We had something better: the actual people of Bad Sülze.
When we were asked to create a campaign across several towns in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, we invited local residents to take part once again. They became the faces of their town—large, proud and rather difficult to miss. If you want people to notice a place, start with the people who make it worth noticing.
Credits
Director of Photography
Photography
Team Leading
Let the gallery wander
Empty shops have a bad habit of looking empty. So we filled one with art.
Bad Sülze, like many small towns, has vacant spaces waiting for somebody to give them a new purpose. To draw attention to them, we came up with the idea of a wandering gallery. The principle is simple: the town rents an empty space and turns it into a gallery for exhibitions, concerts and creative projects. When somebody wants to open a business there, the gallery packs its things and moves to the next empty space.
One former drugstore hosted several exhibitions, small concerts and art projects. Then it became a fitness studio. Art didn’t just fill the space. It helped make room for what came next.
Turn the camera around
Visitors usually take photographs of the places they visit. We turned the camera around.
We created a large series of portraits of people visiting Bad Sülze—giving them a place in the town’s story and something to tell others about when they went home. Some of those portraits now look out from the windows of the Hotel Stadt Hamburg on the marketplace, drawing attention to a building waiting for its next chapter.
A picture may be worth a thousand words. A face can sometimes say even more.
Give the town more than one slogan
Branding people like one slogan. Something short. Something clever. Something that supposedly explains everything. Bad Sülze refused to fit into one.
It is peaceful and lively. Old and new. Slightly sleepy in places and full of ideas in others. It means different things to different people. So we didn’t create one slogan. We created plenty of them.
Because why squeeze an entire town into one sentence when you can start a whole conversation?
What happened next
One music video won the PopFiSH Music Video Award 2025. A billboard campaign carried Bad Sülze into several towns across Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Portraits turned residents and visitors into visible ambassadors. And one temporary gallery helped an empty former drugstore find a permanent new use as a fitness studio. Most importantly, what began as one project became an ongoing collaboration that has continued since 2023.