From our own experience …
West Berlin, 1984: the Wall is still standing and the city is a retreat for revolutionaries, conscientious objectors and artists. It’s a habitat for the maladjusted, those who fled to the divided city because things were too restricted for them elsewhere in Germany.

At around this time, two people found each other: two people whose professional partnership is still going strong to this day. Now, in the new millennium, that partnership is turning into an opportunity for a coming generation.

Heidi Fleiß and René Hofmann have completed their degrees in product design and want to do something completely new. They have little money, but some impressive ideas. They live together in rather cramped circumstances and negotiate Berlin’s days and famous nights together. Calling things into question is the done thing. Why must music sound like music? Why must fashion look like fashion? Why does jewellery have to be made from gold and diamonds? Designing jewellery, more than anything else, appeals to them. And their objective is to create ‘different’ jewellery using new, unusual materials and finding the forms to match.

Another idea comes to them one morning after a party while they are standing in front of a pile of bottles and glasses in the kitchen of their bedsitter: to make jewellery out of glass. Although they enjoyed success over the subsequent years with their creations made from many other materials, that special wish of their remains a wish.

… creating experience for others.

What began in the mid-1980s with the idea of simply designing ‘different’ jewellery turned into a success story for the two young designers. It took a long time, however, and encountered many obstacles and detours along the way.

Today they are asking themselves whether it couldn’t have been a little simpler. ‘Having the good fortune to be young and fresh and to be doing what you feel like doing is often no use when the surroundings aren’t right,’ says Heidi Fleiß.

She and René Hofmann found such suitable surroundings; after their Berlin days were over, too, they found a congenial niche at bastian, the jewellery manufacturer in Bremen, for whom they have worked for years now as house designers.

Thanks to bastian and its entrepreneurial boldness, they now have the chance to offer other designers the opportunity that they themselves would have liked.

Their idea is a designers’ residential community in which gifted newcomers can live and work for a year, and in which they can make their dreams and ideas come true with professional equipment and help and without any commercial constraints.

‘Our wish is to take people with fresh ideas by the hand, or rather allow them a long leash, and watch them grow in a fruitful environment,’ says Heidi Fleiß. The intention is to attract young designers from all over Europe to live and work in Berlin – the place where it all began for Heidi and René.

Together with bastian’s management, they elaborated a concept that saw the light of day in 2009 under the name of ‘Spreeglanz’.