Shortly after I turned 20, I figured it was time to get my first place. Back then, you still had to look in the newspapers, and lo and behold: an old building, a rear building, great location but in terrible condition! Ten out of twelve apartments were empty; only on the ground floor lived a somewhat eccentric old lady, and right next door to her was Angela Merkel’s mother (well, that’s Berlin for you). I looked at all the empty apartments and then decided on the ground floor (yes, I’m talking about Berlin on the Spree here—though back in 2001).

My father was already self-employed in the GDR, renovating apartments. Wallpapering walls, sanding floors, installing hardwood flooring, replacing windows and doors, tiling bathrooms—I picked up all these skills over time during my school breaks, and after a while, the results of my work were actually good enough to justify the fact that I was getting paid for it. So I decided to tackle the renovation of my place on my own.

Just under six months later, I was done, and now all I needed was some furniture. Unfortunately, my bank account was just as empty as the apartment, and the furniture I liked best was way too expensive. Saarinen, Eames, Jacobsen, and the like are, sadly, not for apprentices or those just starting out in the trades. Maybe I could build my own furniture? Practice makes perfect… I quickly built a bed, a dining table, and a few shelves, and I actually enjoyed it! Could I maybe even make a living doing this in the future? I finished my physical therapy training shortly after and already knew that what I really wanted to do was build furniture.

How to get started? Since my savings had gone toward renovating my apartment, I couldn’t afford a workshop or a store. So I decided to enter the business world as a “semi-legal flying” vendor at train stations and flea markets. And since beds and dining tables were a bit impractical for a mobile stand, I chose a 3D wooden dinosaur skeleton as my first product. No idea why I thought that might be a good idea. Maybe because I’m a big fan of Star Trek and Jurassic Park, and the Enterprise NCC 1701-D seemed a bit too complex to build as a 3D wooden puzzle.

No sooner said than done. I bought a small electric scroll saw, built the first 3D wooden frames, and then set up shop at Berlin’s Ostbahnhof with my first dinosaurs. I didn’t sell a single one on the first day, or on the second. I started to get the feeling that my little dinosaurs might go extinct just as quickly, and that maybe I should stick to being a physical therapist after all. But on the third day, it finally worked out: I had actually sold one dinosaur! I thought that might be the breakthrough—it wasn’t. Only later did I find out that my mother had sent someone to buy the dinosaur—oh dear, it was well-intentioned but still hurt.

Well, there’s always a lot going on in Berlin, and so it happened that a short time later, more or less by accident (and because, to be honest, things didn’t go so well with those first woodworking kits), I started a cleaning company. That worked pretty well for a few years until, in 2009, in the wake of the real estate crisis, a few reset buttons were pushed in the Berlin real estate market as well, and a lot of value vanished into thin air overnight. Unfortunately, along with that, my clients and my cleaning company also disappeared.

But since the cleaning business had been going well for 3–4 years, I’d managed to save a little money and figured it was time for a second try in the interior design industry. I found a run-down shop (but in a good location) in Prenzlauer Berg, and I already had some experience with renovations. I bought old furniture on eBay and at flea markets and restored it, then resold it in my shop. Luckily, that went a bit better than with the dinosaurs. I was able to pay my rent (mostly) on time and had fun doing what I was doing. After five years, the lease expired, and the friendly property management company decided that an 85% rent increase was a reasonable and fair measure, given that I had renovated the shop at my own expense. I did a quick calculation, and my calculator told me to move out.

On the outskirts of Berlin, I found an old barn where I stored my stuff and thought about what to do next. From then on, I wanted to focus solely on bringing my own ideas to life and selling them online to avoid those rent-gouging landlords. It went better than expected. Soon the barn became too small, and we moved to a larger warehouse. From now on, “I” becomes “we,” because from here on out, we can talk about a team.

A little time passed, and one day I got a call from a nice guy named John, who asked me how many Retrostar Chair sofas we had in stock. I told him we could build as many as he wanted. He seemed to like that, because he said they needed a lot of furniture for a production they were shooting in Berlin on behalf of NETFLIX. My first thought was that he was some weirdo with too much time on his hands, since a lot of people in Berlin have so-called “projects.”

Luckily for us, John wasn’t some weirdo, but a super-nice employee at X-Films, and shortly thereafter we got to furnish various stunningly beautiful sets from the Netflix series Queens Gambit —which was filmed in Berlin— Queens Gambit our furniture, and even watch the filming for a bit. That alone was really great, but the fact that Queens Gambit turned out to be Queens Gambit a cool series and won plenty of awards—including the Golden Globe, the Emmy, and the DGA (Best Set Design!)—made it all the more wonderful. Fortunately, X-Films enjoyed working with us just as much as we did, so in the fall of 2022 we were able to collaborate on another feature film project and are looking forward to what the future holds. 

What else is there to say? In Austria, we had the opportunity to furnish Manuel and Anna Veith’s beautiful Arx Hotel with our furniture. For the Berlin-based event agency Openers, we regularly bring plenty of color to their events—for clients like Spotify, for example. And despite Brexit, most of our furniture is still in London, and unfortunately, we still don’t have a distributor in Japan. It could be worse.