Why would you want to start your own business? Being an entrepreneur has a certain allure; it certainly makes for a better introduction when you meet someone at a party. But the sweat and stress that come with this job title should not be underestimated.

At the start-up stage, there’s money at stake (and often funds contributed by friends and family who wouldn’t mind seeing it come back to them one day). In the up-and-running years, questions about stamina arise: can you really keep working seven days a week? Then, when you hit your stride, there are additional anxieties to contend with. How can you continue growing at pace? Should you bring in investors – or even sell?

But, every year, hundreds of Monocle readers decide that it’s time to say farewell to the corporate life, give up on salary security and do their own thing. Though I imagine that most of them would like to make enough money to lead a comfortable life, for many there are other important factors to consider: a sense of freedom, doing something that they are genuinely passionate about and taking a chance.

And these are the ideas, the draws, that we unpack and investigate over the following pages. This is a magazine for entrepreneurs at every stage of the self-driven adventure. Across its pages, it offers encouragement, advice and some amusing asides.

One idea that becomes apparent is that you don’t have to come up with a crazy new idea to succeed. Often finessing something that already exists is the way to go – so don’t hold back while you search for that elusive gap in the market. In this issue, you will meet the switched-on team that has revitalised an old East German lighting brand and the crafty folks who are continuing centuries-old trades with the support of guilds.

There are also plenty of modern innovators who we would like to introduce you to, from a maker of tiles in Shanghai who uses recycled plates and pottery to the business exploring how co-working and homes for seniors can create a powerful union in Hamburg. There’s much to discover.

Then there’s the question of where you should run your business from, the places that will foster an entrepreneurial flair. We’ll take you on a tour of two Spanish outposts that are attracting design-minded start-ups: Galicia and Valencia. We walk you around a Jakarta market that has become a hothouse for generating new brands in Indonesia and more places besides.

Every entrepreneur needs to start their journey somewhere. Perhaps yours will begin after you finish reading this copy of The Entrepreneurs. Your business won’t be easy but it will be worthwhile. And it will be yours.

For more on starting up and running a company, ensure that you listen to Monocle’s weekly podcast, The Entrepreneurs.

Few start-ups make as much noise during their first 100 days as Yi Design. The Chinese ceramic tile and brick company spent the spring of 2021 knocking on studio doors in Jingdezhen, China’s porcelain capital, asking to buy leftover ceramics and then transporting the broken plates, bowls and mugs to its factory outside the city centre. The resulting pile of high-grade porcelain – weighing millions of kilogrammes – provided the basis of the business’s product development and inspired its slogan, “We move mountains”.

Customers, including Chinese luxury fashion brands Erdos and Icicle, are using the YiTile, made from 70 per cent recycled materials, to kit out their shops and flagship boutiques. International expansion to Japan, the US, Australia and South Korea has come through several design- and eco-conscious clients across Europe. “Cos is extremely supportive of us and global studio Brinkworth is using our tiles for its New Balance shops,” says Caroline Cheng, Yi Design’s 63-year-old founder and creative director. She speaks to Monocle at the company’s headquarters in Shanghai, one of its several outposts alongside those in Jingdezhen, Dali and London.

Born in the UK to parents from Hong Kong who were scions of the Amoy soy-sauce empire, Cheng grew up surrounded by the family business but her career has been dedicated to ceramics rather than condiments. Her artworks sit in the collection of leading museums and she tutors at Central Saint Martins College of Art in London.

Her route into entrepreneurship started in 1991 when she joined Hong Kong’s The Pottery Workshop – a centre based in multiple locations across China that teaches students the art of handmade ceramics to support and provide them with a career after graduation. Now that her daughter has taken leadership of that operation, Cheng is dedicating most of her time to Yi Design.

Her brand’s products, including the YiBrick, an award-winning permeable brick made almost entirely from recycled materials, now sit in the material libraries of firms including Foster + Partners, Brinkworth and Heatherwick Studio.

The business is breaking even and Cheng says that she is in no rush to make a fortune. As interest in Yi Design’s products grows in influential circles, she is focusing on lowering the carbon emissions of her kilns, either by firing at cooler temperatures or making the transition to renewables. “In China, every business likes to explode but I want to do it slowly until one day paying a premium for recycled ceramics is suddenly something that everybody can do.”
yidesigngroup.com

For decades, mass emigration drained Poland of its brightest and best. In the first 10 years of the country’s membership of the EU, from 2004, about 5 per cent of citizens left the country – the majority of them settling in Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and the UK. Most were young people. A 2013 survey showed that as many as 69 per cent of Poles had either a family member or close friend living and working permanently abroad.

Those days are passing. Poland’s economy has grown 4 per cent on average every year since 2004. Salaries have tripled, disposable income has skyrocketed and Warsaw has one of the fastest-growing economies of Europe’s capitals. Poland is the continent’s land of opportunity – and its brain drain has reversed: between 2017 and 2024 at least 300,000 Poles who were residing abroad moved back home. Here, we meet four young Poles who have returned or turned down opportunities to leave.

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1.
Agnieszka Homanska
The political adviser

Agnieszka Homanska is rarely seen without her wheeled suitcase. The 27-year-old runs the political cabinet of Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski – so does a lot of travelling. Taking up the job three years ago meant not pursuing a master’s degree in political science at McGill University in Montréal. “I had already booked the flights,” she tells Monocle outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building in Warsaw. A graduate of the University of Warsaw, where she read applied linguistics and international relations, Homanska made a name for herself during the 2023 parliamentary election, running the campaign of Aleksandra Uznanska-Wisniewska, one of Poland’s youngest MPs. On the campaign trail, she bonded with Sikorski, who then offered her a job.

“I always wanted to be a diplomat,” she says. “I wanted to stay and strengthen Poland’s position in Europe.” In 2023, Homanska co-founded Zryw, a nonpartisan initiative that aims to convince students and graduates to become involved in public life. “Poland is recognised as a key European geopolitical player and our economic success story is well-known,” she says. “Yet we are having trouble telling that story internationally. My generation wants to change that.” This year, Zryw held six events to persuade graduates to work for the state. And those flights to Canada? “I went skiing there for two weeks,” Homanska says.

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2.
Michal Tarnowski
The civil servant

Michal Tarnowski considers himself a social entrepreneur. The 30-year-old returned to his homeland from the UK seven years ago to work as a social entrepreneur, during which time he developed a civil service fast-track scheme for young candidates. In 2025 he joined the Ministry of Digital Affairs to work on Poland’s digital services tax. “I always saw myself in a career with high public impact,” he says. “In Poland, which has stunning macroeconomic indicators but very low civic activity, that is a readily achievable goal.”

Tarnowski calls Poland a “partially mature country” in terms of public involvement. “With the civil service, the system often does not know how to make good use of your talent, especially if you studied abroad,” says Tarnowski, who has a PPE degree from the University of Oxford. “So you need to create space for yourself, which is not easy.” Still, Tarnowski would never dream of leaving Warsaw. “Over the past five years, this place has changed beyond recognition,” he says. “You can find employment, education and public service but also a great lifestyle.”

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3.
Marcin Szala
The educator

“We would often hear from students and parents that any foreign education was better than staying in Poland,” says Marcin Szala. “That is no longer the case.”

In 2022, Szala co-founded Liceum Artes Liberales (LAL), a private high school whose aim is to prepare students for 21st-century life. Spanning two floors of a vast office building in Warsaw’s Wola district, the space features relatively few doors or walls. This is supposed to instil in students a feeling of freedom. Unlike in the majority of schools, the teachers’ room is accessible to all – and the curriculum is similarly expansive. “Nowadays, students and their parents think differently about education,” says the 46-year-old, leaning against a whiteboard filled with ancient Greek and Latin words. He aims to introduce a sense of multidisciplinary curiosity into students’ minds by moving the conversation away from vocation and instead towards free thinking.

Students are required to take the responsibility of organising trips for themselves and their classmates to businesses, museums and educational institutions. They also run a programme called Current Affairs, inviting guest speakers to the school once a week to discuss the state of the world. Recent subjects have included the gig economy and the US government’s trade policy.

“It is an entirely reactive project,” says Szala. “Even with that in their schedule, our students still find time for extracurricular societies.” These include Latin, chess and philosophy clubs, which are treated as intrinsic to, rather than separate from, subjects such as chemistry and economics. Szala believes that the Polish education system now teaches STEM subjects at a similar level to those of its European peers. “This summer we had cases where students turned down offers from prestigious UK universities to enrol at the University of Warsaw.” Still, Szala laments a gap in business studies, as well as in the humanities and social sciences, which he says are still underfunded and underappreciated in Poland. With LAL, he aims to change that.

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4.
Aleksandra Pedraszewska
The fund manager

“Every major investor in Europe wants to be up to date with news from Poland,” says 32-year-old Aleksandra Pedraszewska, who left a career in tech in London to set up Vastpoint, a venture-capital fund that focuses on Polish start-ups. Monocle meets Pedraszewska at the Google Campus in Warsaw’s post-industrial Praga District, where she’s speaking at a conference held by a tech company in which she and her two co-founders have invested. “We have three decades of experience spanning London, Berlin and New York,” she says. Pedraszewska takes daily phone calls from curious overseas fund managers. “We aim to bring international investors here and show them the inside story of our economic miracle.”

ElevenLabs, valued at $11bn (€9.5bn) and a global market leader in AI-powered voice-to-text tech, often comes up in such conversations. Founded in Warsaw in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski, it was largely shunned by Silicon Valley but has become synonymous with Poland’s economic miracle. Pedraszewska helps foreign investors avoid such oversights. “We have grown big enough as a market to attract international investors and give people opportunities to make a lot of money,” she says. “It’s hard to think of a situation more apt for an emerging manager like me.”

Still, challenges remain. “We have very good schools but we lack opportunities and capital for the very best ones to scale their talent up globally,” she says. “There is still not enough private capital for young companies to grow, so we keep losing people who move overseas, mostly to Silicon Valley. But that is a pan-European problem – Poland will not solve it alone.”

“It’s somewhere between indoors and outdoors,” says Danai Surasa. “People can remain connected to daylight, fresh air, the landscape and weather throughout the working day.” The co-founder of Bangkok-based Studio Krubka is explaining his firm’s design for the new HQ of natural pharmaceutical company Novolife on the outskirts of the Thai capital. The striking concrete building has lofty curved roofs and large, rectangular apertures – some of them windows, others portals to a verdant internal courtyard.

This blurring of boundaries between inside and out is a reflection of the company’s entrepreneurial aspirations. “Novolife develops products using Thai herbs and natural ingredients with the aim of supporting people’s wellbeing,” says Soyploy Phanich, Surasa’s fellow co-founder. “So we started with a simple question: if wellbeing is central to what the company produces, how can it also become part of the everyday working environment?”

The answer came in a layout that prompts people to encounter the lush courtyard as they move through the building. This is supported by a restrained colour palette that directs the eye to the leafy gardens – an effect that is enhanced by shifting light, weather and temperatures, all of which become accomplices to the architecture. “This workplace can feel different from one moment to the next, even though the building itself remains the same,” says Phanich. This environmentally minded approach is enhanced by the materiality and construction processes. The concrete was made using locally sourced aggregates without extensive chemical additives, while a reusable steel formwork shapes the structure.

Though the building has a strikingly minimalist concrete form, it also pays tribute to Thailand’s vernacular wooden architecture. Life in a Southeast Asian climate means dealing with heavy rainfall, so the office has a traditional bowed butterfly roof that channels rainwater to a central collecting spine. “Thai architecture has long developed ways of responding to the region’s heavy rain and tropical climate,” says Surasa. “We wanted to reinterpret that in a modern way.”

The building makes a compelling case for the beauty of a workplace shaped around nature and connected to the environment, while retaining something in common with the business inhabiting it. “A workplace should reflect the same ideas as the people developing the products,” says Surasa.
studiokrubka.weebly.com

“Everyone thinking that they could become unicorns was clearly a fool’s errand,” says Lauren Santo Domingo, who co-founded fashion retail platform Moda Operandi in New York in 2010, just as venture capitalists and private-equity firms began eyeing up fashion businesses. The opportunities for quick customer acquisition and scaling up seemed endless, so investors started pouring money into the fashion sector in the same way as they had been with the tech industry and food businesses.

“Private-equity firms wanted to replicate the success that they had with the grocery sector, particularly in Canada,” says Santo Domingo. “They thought that fashion is an equivalent industry because we have seasonal products. But you can’t apply private-equity logic to a business that’s so much about instinct and relationships. Sometimes the decisions that fashion brands or retailers make aren’t rational.” Santo Domingo raised several rounds of funding to expand Moda Operandi to new territories, including $165m (€142m) led by Apax Digital Growth. The same year, the fund also acquired London-based competitor Matches Fashion at a valuation of $1bn (€860m).

These investors began betting heavily on up-and-coming apparel-and-accessories brands such as Copenhagen-based Ganni, which sold a majority stake to L Catterton (LVMH’s investment vehicle) in 2017; and Los Angeles-based Anine Bing, which raised $15m (€12.9m) in 2018 in a series-A round led by firms such as Felix Capital and Index Ventures – and $13.5m (€11.6m) less than a year later.

“At any start-up event, the conversation was always about how much money you raised and how many people you hired – as if those were the only metrics of success,” says Noura Sakkijha, who founded jewellery start-up Mejuri in 2015, during the industry’s private-equity boom. “This was a time when funding seemed unlimited if you were a fashion entrepreneur.”

Equally, investors had full confidence that they would receive their returns tenfold by simply opening more shops and boosting production of existing bestselling products. But this strategy diminished the importance of innovation and customers grew tired of seeing the same products, as well as shop concepts being copied and pasted, around the world. At the turn of the decade, revenues slowed and investors began to realise that quick returns are almost impossible when it comes to an ever-changing industry that’s reliant on storytelling and consumer psychology.

It’s why L Catterton has pulled back on most of its fashion investments, including the sale of sustainable-clothing label Everlane to fast-fashion giant Shein (a controversial move because of a clear misalignment in ecological values). US-based label Reformation – another product of the 2010s investing boom – started trading publicly in July, with its stock price continuing to fall below market expectations. As for Apax, it sold Matches for €60m to the UK’s Frasers Group, which declared the company bankrupt shortly afterwards.

These public fallouts have transformed the current landscape. The entrepreneurs who managed to make it out are buying back their businesses and rethinking the pace at which they want to operate, while investors looking to make quick exits are staying clear of fashion. “We were lucky to get out alive and put our private-equity days behind us,” says Santo Domingo, who was able to exit her partnership with Apax and refocus on her original business model and the company’s home market. “Any brand that is still doing well today is staying true to itself – hype is becoming hard to sustain.”

In place of that hype-based businesses is a new generation of brands that are returning to fundamentals: customer-centric approaches and understanding the value of ownership and creative control. In the United States, designer Jamie Haller has been building her company at pace. Her namesake clothing-and-accessories brand grew 450 per cent between 2023 and 2024 – without taking on any outside investment since its launch in 2020. “In an age of hedge-fund brands, AI-generated content and faceless marketing, what I’m doing feels intimate,” says Haller, whose brand stands out for its polished suiting and smart penny loafers. “I write my newsletters myself every night; customers can talk to me. These small moments of connectivity give customers a place to land.”

Haller makes a compelling case for the benefits of a self-starter approach in a business’s early days. It also signals a broader cultural shift towards independent brands with a clear mission statement. “Entrepreneurs are valuing ownership, control and bootstrapping more so than before, which is refreshing,” says Eshita Kabra-Davies of By Rotation. In the past decade, she pursued several rounds of investment for her fashion-rental start-up but stayed focused on her original peer-to-peer business model. As a result, By Rotation is on its way to reaching profitability: “I always think about my ownership and the alignment of the potential investor with our mission and values,” she adds.

Elsewhere, Mireia Llusia-Lindh, the founder of contemporary accessories label Demellier, argues that raising capital is still a necessary step for any ambitious entrepreneur who wants to build a global enterprise – but today partnerships are being formed on different terms. “More people are recognising that raising capital does not necessarily mean building a better company,” says Llusia-Lindh, whose brand’s sales grew 60 per cent last year, despite tough market conditions and an investment drought. “You need to build a company for long-term growth, not just for the next two years. Building a fashion brand, in particular, takes time. You can accelerate distribution or marketing but you cannot manufacture genuine customer connection or a strong brand identity overnight. Those are built through consistency over many years.”

Llusia-Lindh, who’s preparing to open a first flagship shop in London this autumn, adds that there’s more “scrutiny on profits” on the part of investors and an understanding that luxury is a long-term game. This means that fashion entrepreneurs shouldn’t give up on financial partnerships but do need to look beyond private equity to family offices or boutique firms that specialise in luxury. David Wertheimer, son of Chanel co-owner Gérard Wertheimer, is one of them. He set up 1686 Partners in Luxembourg to back fashion and lifestyle brands that prioritise slow production and high-end quality, such as artisanal eyewear label Ahlem and high-end running label Satisfy.

Santo Domingo is also using the expertise that she has built during decades of championing young designers and growing Moda Operandi to create her own fund, St Dominique Capital. Some of her early investments include handmade rug company Nordic Knots and The Row, an American label that has become an emblem of modern-day luxury. “I don’t care where a venture capitalist sits – they’re never going to have the same intel,” she says. “We have a front-row seat; we know whether a designer is a one-hit wonder or whether they have longevity. By taking an equity stake, we have extra incentive to propel these brands forward using the tools at our disposal, from warehousing to merchandising. There was so much money and so much burn. Don’t get me wrong, it was fun while it lasted – but it wasn’t sustainable. We need to go back to basics and remember that fashion businesses really are about the designer and the customer.”

In 1960 the Trans-Canada Highway bypassed the downtown business district of Chilliwack, a small city 100km east of Vancouver – dealing it a near-fatal blow. But now day trippers from the big city craving a taste of small-town life head for District 1881 – 1.5 hectares of land transformed into a bustling micro-neighbourhood of shops, cafés, apartments, offices and a hotel.

The visionaries behind this mixed-use gem in the rural Fraser River valley are three siblings who operate as Algra Bros Developments Ltd. Co-partner Dave Algra says that the area was a no-man’s-land in 2018. “You couldn’t pay someone $20 to park here and walk down the street,” he tells Monocle.

But Dave and his brothers, Phil and Peter, are committed to their native valley. Much of the city’s downtown building stock dates back to the prewar era. With the right design, tenant mix and branding, they were convinced that the city centre could thrive once again.

So Algra Bros persuaded local officials that a mix of building types would have a salutary effect. “To revitalise the downtown, you need thousands of people,” says Dave, describing his pitch that a high street packed with places to shop and have coffee would generate more footfall than residential construction alone. The brothers earned this wisdom over decades that began with them working in construction, then saving enough money to buy land and build homes. Each brother brought a skill set – land assembly from Dave, design from Peter and finance from Phil – and an aggressive growth mindset that leaned on relationships that they had made working on job sites.

In 2010 they won a bid to develop several hundred homes on a former military base and learnt that pedestrian-orientated design – houses with easy access to shops and parks – sold better. Rehabbing old buildings near their office in downtown Abbotsford, 25km from Chilliwack, showed how to make commercial property work in small communities desperate for character – Algra Bros buildings were often leased or sold even before the paint dried. District 1881 is the result of these lessons. Its final building was completed last year and the average commercial rent is 400 per cent higher than when they started eight years ago. “We’re three years ahead of schedule,” says Dave of the return on investment.

And the high street’s thriving businesses concur. Shopkeeper Lily Ellis, who opened Spruce Collective, a shop specialising in locally made wares, says, “I never envisioned Chilliwack as a retail destination.”

The brothers have no interest in franchising. “We’re not efficiency kings,” says Dave. “We like the challenge of creating solutions. It doesn’t seem like many people in our industry behave that way.”
district1881.com

In the early 2000s, Monocle first encountered Club-Mate in Berlin. It tasted unlike anything that we had ever encountered: herbal and slightly medicinal, with the briskness of something engineered to keep you awake. “You’ll get used to it,” promised the gaucho figure on the bottle. And we did. In the techno and hacker scenes, it spread quickly thanks to a caffeine content about twice that of Coca-Cola – a useful pick-me-up.

More recently it has begun travelling more confidently abroad. In London, bottles have appeared in independent grocer Nourished Communities. “What’s interesting is how Club-Mate cuts across partygoers, health-conscious customers and even tech bros,” says its founder, Rollo Millership. He attributes this to the drink’s ability to tick several boxes. It’s low in sugar and offers a natural hit of caffeine. “The fact that it’s under the radar adds to its cult-like mystique,” says Millership.

The company behind the drink is something of a mystery too. It doesn’t give sit-down interviews or allow factory visits, though it is, in correspondence with Monocle, very responsive. “We follow a no-marketing strategy, aiming to win people over solely through taste and quality,” says a spokesperson.

The drink is derived from South American yerba-mate shrub leaves, which have long been brewed into a stimulating tea. In 1924 a German pharmacist turned it into a carbonated soft drink called Sekt-Bronte. Some 20 years later, drinks merchant G Latteyer licensed it. Then, in 1994, Latteyer’s son-in-law sold the licence to Loscher brewery in Bavaria, which renamed it Club-Mate and it began its slow journey towards becoming a cult hit. The brewery is said to export Club-Mate to more than 60 countries but how the caffeinated soft drink travelled so far without any marketing is something that even the brewery cannot quite fathom.

Club-Mate comes in seven varieties – probably a response to a growing field of competitors. Most drinkers, though, stick with the original, whose decades of subcultural credibility are harder to copy than its recipe.
club-mate.de

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Further reading:
From Crodino to Jarritos: The world’s most beloved soft drinks

Standing out in Jakarta’s highly competitive shopping-mall sector requires something special. The crowds pouring into Agora Mall, a mixed-use development in central Jakarta (and the southern hemisphere’s tallest building), are flocking up the escalators for the latest edition of Brightspot Market. The temporary retail jamboree is held twice a year and hosts 251 fashion brands and food concepts, whittled down from 3,000 applicants. A record 217,000 people end up attending the May and June market, and total sales hit new heights, despite Indonesia’s misfiring economy.

“When we started in 2009, we wanted a festival where the stars are Indonesian retail brands,” says Anton Wirjono, Brightspot’s 56-year-old CEO and co-founder. “But we couldn’t find a sponsor because there wasn’t trust in local brands. Now, Indonesian brands are the draw.” Monocle meets him at the entrance just before 10.00 on the market’s second day (in total, it’s running for 10 across several weekends). Considered the “mayor” of Brightspot’s pop-up city, he has been staying up late with his brother, Hogi, to perfect the wayfinding. Long-term sponsorship by Bank Central Asia means that entrance is free and every stall has the same payment system.

Brightspot is as much about raising brand awareness as selling products. Monocle meets investors, retailers and tastemakers looking for the next big thing. Emmelyn Gunawan, the founder of Bali-based multibrand shop Escalier, is here to catch up with vendors. “I have found many brands at Brightspot over the years,” she says. Two years ago, she came across fashion label Sunburn, which was founded by a surfer from Java. “His T-shirts took me back to the 1990s. This year we started a collaboration.”

Over lunch at Brightspot’s food hall, the Wirjono brothers, their sister, Cynthia, and co-founder Leonard Theosabrata reflect on their journey from outsider status to the mainstream. In the 1990s, Anton returned to Jakarta from San Francisco, where he had been a DJ. “There weren’t any cool things happening here so we had to create them,” he says. He decided to put on a retail and food festival. Seventeen years later, Brightspot has become a major event. “Our aim is for the mass market to be more culture, design and brand aware,” says Anton, who adds that 2025 was a turning point, when running the market over two consecutive weekends (rather than one) boosted attendance.

A new outdoor “picnic” called Taman Brightspot debuted this year to host more food and drink brands, and serve as a feeder event for fashion labels aspiring to be included in the main market. Similar events could follow in other Indonesian cities and Anton is eyeing up global expansion, starting with Malaysia and Singapore. “Post-AI, this is it: humans selling to humans,” he says. “Offline retail is the future. When people go to Tokyo, they see the temples only once or twice. But they go back to shop and eat. That is our contribution to Jakarta.”
brightspotmrkt.com

Joshua Breidenbach and Chí-An De Leo don’t only want to run a good creative agency – the Ho Chi Minh City duo also want to define what Vietnamese brands look like on a global stage. “Vietnam is experiencing a shift from being the workshop of the world to a maker of brands that matter,” says De Leo, when Monocle visits their studio in the city’s Vo Thi Sau Ward. “The resources are here. The talent is here. The market is young, savvy and involved. What’s needed now is intent.” And they might well be the ones to deliver on it.

The pair met in Vietnam’s former capital while working for different advertising agencies. Breidenbach arrived in Asia from the US in 2006; De Leo, who was born in Germany to Vietnamese-French and Italian parents, grew up in France, Taiwan, the UK and Vietnam. In 2011 they founded Rice and spent more than a decade building Brand Vietnam by elevating the status of local firms through savvy marketing, all while running a successful business.

By last year, however, that business had outgrown itself. It was too big for the projects that built its name but still lacked an international footprint. The fix wasn’t to sell up but instead to become an independent affiliate of Base Design, a Brussels-founded global collective. Becoming its fifth member – and rebranding as Base Saigon – enabled Breidenbach, De Leo and their team of 28 to remain independent yet gained them access to international talent and know-how. “We were immediately plugged into other offices in Brussels, Geneva, New York and Melbourne,” says Breidenbach. “Everyone here has a counterpart in another part of the world who they can bounce off.”

The timing was exceptional. One of the studio’s marquee clients, Marou, was making the same leap. The Vietnamese chocolatier was in the process of opening a shop in Singapore’s Changi Airport. With that came a continuation of Base Saigon’s award-winning branding: the studio worked on a product line of chocolate animals that reflect the ecosystem of cacao farms. In a similar vein, Base Saigon is also overseeing a brand repositioning of Highlands Coffee, the largest coffee chain in Vietnam. A refreshed business strategy has been accompanied by new packaging and visual guidelines. The chain recently opened its 1,000th coffee shop in Vietnam and has the backing of mighty multinational Filipino fast-food giant Jollibee. “Both projects are deeply authentic to themselves and to Vietnam, with a clarity of story and point of view that invites global curiosity and genuine participation,” says De Leo.

The clearest evidence of the pair’s ambition isn’t client work, though. In 2025 they hosted the AGI conference in Ho Chi Minh City, drawing 130 of the industry’s biggest names. “It has been the maddest year of our career,” says De Leo, adding that while it was stressful to do this mid-rebrand, it was a deliberate extension of the duo’s ambition to place Vietnam at the centre of the branding world.

It’s also why Rice, as an entity, hasn’t disappeared with the studio’s rechristening. The old name is now an umbrella for everything adjacent to Base Saigon’s client work. This ranges from an upcycled plastic furniture line to travel guides and an intention to host more design conferences in Ho Chi Minh City. The partners are also hoping to build a studio-academy model that will allow them to provide opportunities creating work placements for Vietnamese design students.

All of which is infrastructure to support a bigger ambition. “Vietnamese businesses have an opportunity to shape the country’s reputation abroad,” says De Leo. “The world has yet to make up its mind about ‘Made in Vietnam’.” That might be true but Breidenbach and De Leo are playing an active role in enhancing it.
basedesign.com

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Branding triumphs

Base Saigon knows how to position Vietnamese companies in a global context – and vice versa. Here are three standout examples.

1.
Highlands Coffee
Base Saigon was behind a limited-run espresso campaign that used swirling typography to position homegrown Vietnamese coffee as a serious contender on the world stage.

2.
Mai Lam
A brand strategy brought structure to Vietnamese fashion designer Mai Lam’s chaotic aesthetic and transformed a single Ho Chi Minh City boutique into a fashion label built for international reach.

3.
Maison Marou
A flexible spatial and graphic identity was developed for Maison Marou, rolled out across its products, flagship café, patisserie and chocolate factory in Vietnam.

How does a 107-year-old company ensure that it keeps evolving? For David Einsiedler, the CEO of storied German lighting manufacturer Midgard, it’s about asking the right questions at the right time. “This is the oldest start-up in the world,” he says, as he walks Monocle through the company’s workshop in Hamburg, where technicians are hard at work assembling lamps.

It’s an outlook that reflects the ambition of Midgard’s founder, Curt Fischer. In 1919 the engineer had a practical problem in his mechanical workshop. Industrialisation had extended the working day into the evening, which meant that overhead lighting was crucial but it would cast awkward shadows across the workbenches. So Fischer designed a wall-mounted, jointed lamp with a movable head that could be repositioned as needed. What began as a workshop tool soon entered offices and Bauhaus interiors. By the 1950s, the company had expanded the idea into a spring-balanced lamp with adjustable arms and a swivelling shade, setting a new benchmark for the modern desk light.

Despite this early innovation and success, Midgard faded into obscurity over the following six decades and, by the early 2010s, the company was insolvent. This allowed Einsiedler to purchase the firm in 2015 with his partner and wife, Joke Rasch. They were later joined by Kristin Seel and the trio put a selection of Midgard’s classic designs back into production, including its spring-balanced light and, later, the K831 pendant. Now, they’re seeking to build on Fischer’s legacy by solving lighting’s biggest contemporary problem. “For us, repairability is key,” says Einsiedler. “LEDs have given us enormous freedom but they’re virtually impossible to fix. Even design icons retrofitted with LEDs are often no longer repairable.” To address this, they have made every component of Midgard’s lamps replaceable, often by hand and with minimal effort.

Take Ayno, which was conceived by celebrated German designer Stefan Diez and is a fresh interpretation of Fischer’s original task light, reimagined for a circular economy. “We wanted an adjustable lamp made from recycled or recyclable materials that’s easy for the owner to repair and equipped with exchangeable LED units – all at an accessible price point,” says Einsiedler. Diez responded with a slender standing light composed of a flexible fibreglass rod and a textile cable. Two of its three principal materials – steel and fibreglass – can be separated for recycling.

Loja, Midgard’s latest design, adheres to the same principles. Designed by Offenbach-based Sebastian Herkner, it’s a lamp with a gently curved paper shade perched, like a hat, atop a translucent glass cylinder. Its construction is slotted so there’s no need for glue.

To further enhance these lamps’ repairability, Midgard has developed a standardised LED unit that can be used across its entire contemporary collection – regardless of whether the lamp in question is a new piece or was made several years ago. “Now earlier products can easily be upgraded,” says Einsiedler. Forthcoming LED innovations, such as tunable white light and smart-home integration, will maintain this backwards compatibility too.

“What is the point of repairability if a model is discontinued the following year?” Asking such questions is exactly what inspired Fischer’s innovations a century ago. It’s this curiosity that looks set to keep Midgard ahead of the curve.
midgard.com