Project description

In October 2021, Laurens Gujber, Laurenz Greschner, and I founded the Novum Kollektiv. The basic idea: Bremerhaven lacks a place where young people can meet, party, and get creative. We wanted to change that — with an event location that works as a club for electronic music on weekends and offers space for cultural and artistic programming during the week.

The project started concretely on 2021-10-06. At that point we had: an idea, a small network from our studies (mostly GIF fellow students), and a few first contacts via Werk e.V. and the Kreativer Aufbruch Bremerhaven. What was missing: a name, a brand, a larger network — and above all a place.

From idea to brand

Before we could appear in public, we needed an identity. We spent several days brainstorming and played through terms like Tatendrang, Vorfahrt, Zukunft, Wandelbar, Neuanfang, Aufbruch, Neuland, and Momentum. In the end we voted together — the result was Novum Kollektiv.

For the corporate design we settled on:

• Logo in the typeface Stick No Bills, color #F4E04D on background #000808
• Slogan in Debas Neue, underlined
• Body text in JetBrains Mono
• Highlights in Zilla Slab Highlight

With this design we built an Instagram account meant to reach our target group in Bremerhaven and to document the path toward a subcultural music and culture center. By 2022-01-31 we had published nine images and a video that had already reached around 3,900 people — and 174 followers, of whom 63.2% came from Bremerhaven and another 4.7% from Bremen.

Building a network and the email campaign

A club can't be founded without a network. So we systematically built a network in Bremerhaven — with monday for project management and HubSpot as the CRM. By the end of the project we had documented 154 contacts, 270 notes, as well as around 180 received and 285 sent emails.

The centerpiece was an email campaign: we first researched the legal basis for cold outreach by email, set up our own domain (novum-kollektiv.de) and our own address (moin@novum-kollektiv.de) via Synto eG, and put together a list of 138 contacts — politicians, players from the culture scene, and property owners. For this list we wrote both formal and personal email templates, for example:

"We — that's Tari, Laurenz, and Laurens — are planning to open a club in Bremerhaven and are looking for a property in the seaside city for it…"

Out of these 138 emails, 26 replies came back (six of them rejections) — with the rest we got into a real exchange. Through this network we gained access to central institutions: to the Kulturamt, to Erlebnis Bremerhaven (Ralf Meyer), and to BIS Bremerhaven (Barbara Schieferstein), who supported us with the search for a space and funding questions. Through Niklas Piatkowski from the Kreativer Aufbruch Bremerhaven we got to many more doors.

We also became politically active: we wrote to every democratic party. With the Greens, a regular exchange and inclusion in the "Youth Working Group" came about via Finn Hinrichs; with the SPD we got into conversation through a networking event at the Werk; and on March 8 we were allowed to present our project to the CDU parliamentary group in Bremerhaven.

Everything got a real boost through the press: Luise Langen of the Nordsee-Zeitung reported on us — on the day the article appeared, 50 new followers came in, and the day after, another 18. Shortly afterward, Radio Bremen Fernsehen also got in touch for a filmed feature.

The search for a place

The actual goal — a concrete place for the club — remained the hardest part. Of around 40 to 50 locations examined, three realistic options remained in the end:

1. Columbusbahnhof at the harbor — rooms offered to us by Jens-Erwin Siemssen of the theater group "Das letzte Kleinod," on the condition that we engage with the theme of immigration and emigration. Use possible once, or, with a good response, for up to two years.
2. Tusculum — a rentable event venue near the Alte Bürger with room for around 80 people, well suited to test our concept.
3. Altes Eiswerk — a freshly renovated hall belonging to Kai-Uwe Schulz in the fishing harbor.

As early as 2021-12-03 we had designed and distributed a flyer for the search for a space. Many buildings fell off the list because the owner couldn't be identified, because the city refused to rent, or because the structural condition made use unrealistic.

First event: "Boarding"

Out of the conversations around the Columbusbahnhof, our first own event finally emerged: "Boarding," on 2022-04-01 at the Columbusbahnhof Bremerhaven — with around 200 visitors. The months of networking and searching for a space thus turned, for the first time, into a real event under the name Novum Kollektiv.

What I learned

Brand before substance can be an advantage. We spent days trying to find a perfect logo — without result. But because activating the Instagram account needed a finished corporate design, we settled in the end for a simple wordmark. This pragmatic decision didn't hold us up, but kept the project plan moving. Classic, fully planned project management is often too rigid for a young creative collective — a mix of structure and deliberately left gaps worked better.

Cold outreach works if you take it seriously. The legal research, our own domain, well-thought-out templates, and a clearly defined target group turned a list of 138 contacts into real conversations, appointments, and partnerships. That was, for me, the first proof that structured networking — even with no existing track record — opens doors.

Public attention is a lever. A single newspaper article influenced our reach more than weeks of our own marketing. Since then, with every project I think early about: who could report on this, and what would I want to tell the press?

A strong network isn't automatically the right network. At the end of this phase we had excellent contacts in politics and institutions — but hardly any contact with the young, subcultural scene we wanted to build the club for in the first place. That was an important wake-up call: networking without a clear connection to the actual target group brings reach, but not automatically the right people.

The first step counts more than the perfect plan. Out of months of searching for a space and networking came, with "Boarding" on 2022-04-01, the first real event — even before we had a fixed place. This step from planning into execution was the real turning point of the project.

Conclusion

A vague idea in October 2021 became, within half a year, a registered brand, an Instagram audience of over 150 people, a network of politics, administration, and the culture scene — and the first own event. The Novum Kollektiv had thus laid the foundation on which, a good year and a half later, the pop-up cultural center ZAPPZARAPP would emerge. The experience of having to gather equipment for events from many different places later led to the idea of Kulturdepot — a central rental platform for Bremerhaven's culture scene.