ARCHIVECity Gross Rewrites Fairy Tales to Sell Real Food
How City Gross Used Snow White and Fairy Tales to Argue for Real Food City Gross's "Snow White...
Hornbach Bottled the Smell of Spring and Sold It in a Vending Machine
Hornbach's 2019 campaign 'How Spring Smells' — known in Germany by its original title So riecht das Frühjahr — is a 46-second film created by Berlin-based ad agency Heimat that dramatises the sensory anticipation of the gardening season by collecting sweaty clothing from garden workers, vacuum-packing it, and selling it through urban vending machines.
Published in Germany in March 2019, the campaign targets the moment when seasonal intent meets retail opportunity — the weeks before DIY and garden projects begin in earnest across the German market. Hornbach, a German DIY and garden retailer operating across nine European countries, used the film to position the brand not around product features but around the primal, bodily experience of outdoor labour. Spring is not merely a season in this campaign; it is a smell, and that smell is work.
The campaign contains one primary media asset, a film directed by Sam Hibbard through Anorak Film, Berlin. Its creative logic is built on absurdist humour: the premise that the perspiration of seasonal garden workers is desirable enough to package and sell commercially. A 15-second online cut of the film accumulated close to three million YouTube views within one month of release and led German YouTube advertising charts at the time, according to reporting by horizont.net. The campaign received coverage from Little Black Book and horizont.net on 15 and 18 March 2019 respectively, reflecting immediate trade-press attention across the retail services category. Clapboard assigns the campaign a score of 73 out of 100.
Hornbach occupies the third position in the German and broader European DIY retail segment, according to the brand's own self-description as reported by insightdiy.co.uk. The competitive landscape it navigates includes multinational players such as Groupe Adeo, owner of Leroy Merlin, and Kingfisher, owner of Castorama, both of which compete directly across European markets. Against these rivals, Hornbach has historically relied on brand differentiation through emotional and philosophical advertising rather than price-led promotion — a posture that Heimat has sustained since winning the account in a pitch in 2000, according to reporting by horizont.net.
The strategic insight driving 'How Spring Smells' is rooted in seasonality and sensory memory. Spring is the highest-stakes retail window for any DIY and garden brand operating in Germany, and Heimat chose to dramatise that moment not through product montage or promotional messaging but through the body. The smell of exertion — of soil, sweat, and outdoor air — functions here as a culturally legible shorthand for productive seasonal labour. Retail competitors in the DIY category tend to lead spring communications with category-level product advertising; Hornbach's campaign sidesteps that convention entirely.
Leroy Merlin ran its own creative-led campaign, 'Lessons for Good', in December 2018 through Publicis Italy, moving DIY instruction from stores into schools, according to contagious.com. That campaign, like Hornbach's, demonstrates a sector-wide movement toward value-based storytelling in retail services. In the German market, where brand loyalty in the DIY category is closely tied to a retailer's perceived identity and craft philosophy, Hornbach's absurdist sensory premise carries strategic weight that a conventional spring sale campaign cannot.
Director Sam Hibbard of Anorak Film, Berlin shapes the 46-second film with a deadpan visual register that lets the absurdist premise carry its own logic without editorial comment. The film observes garden workers in physical labour, follows the collection and vacuum-packing of their clothing, and concludes with those sealed packages being dispensed through a vending machine in an urban setting — each stage treated with the matter-of-fact visual grammar of documentary rather than the heightened aesthetics of conventional retail advertising.
The creative team at Heimat behind the campaign includes Chief Creative Officers Guido Heffels and Matthias Storath, with Creative Directors Marlon Fischer and Felix Pfannmüller leading the concept. The film's editing is handled by Ben Campbell at Cut + Run, whose pacing sustains the film's internal logic — allowing the absurdity to accumulate without tipping into parody. Post-production was overseen by Christian Wegehenkel, with sound production credited to Cerstin Cassidy. The score was composed by Philipp Kacza, Timo Blunck, Michael Robb, and Robert Hosp, according to adsofbrands.net, and the music's restraint reinforces the film's commitment to the premise over embellishment.
The campaign avoids the visual montage of seasonal colour and blooming gardens that characterises most spring retail communications in Germany. Instead, the craft is concentrated in texture — the tactile reality of labour — and in the film's structural confidence. It does not explain itself. That restraint is itself a creative decision, consistent with the long-running Heimat-Hornbach philosophy of treating the audience as participants in a shared understanding of what it means to build, grow, and get one's hands dirty.
No verified third-party performance data for the full campaign — including sales uplift, brand tracking shifts, or paid media metrics — is publicly available for 'How Spring Smells'. What is documented is the film's organic reach: the 15-second online version of the campaign accumulated close to three million YouTube views within one month of its March 2019 release and led German YouTube advertising charts at that time, according to horizont.net. That level of organic traction in the German market, without verified paid amplification figures, points to a creative execution capable of generating earned attention at scale.
The structural effectiveness of the campaign rests on two mechanics. First, the premise creates genuine curiosity — a retail film built around an olfactory experience that film, by definition, cannot deliver. The gap between what the ad promises and what any screen-based format can provide becomes the tension that drives viewing and sharing. Second, the campaign's release timing in mid-March 2019 positions it precisely at the moment when German consumers begin forming seasonal purchase intent around gardening and home improvement, making the sensory provocation directly adjacent to category behaviour.
The Heimat-Hornbach relationship, described by horizont.net as approximately 19 years old at the time of the campaign's release, provides the brand consistency against which individual executions like this one operate. A campaign this formally unusual requires a brand identity stable enough to absorb the risk. Hornbach's long-term investment in that identity through Heimat is what makes the absurdist vending machine premise legible as a brand statement rather than a creative non-sequitur.
'How Spring Smells' is a 46-second film created by Heimat, Berlin for German DIY retailer Hornbach, published in Germany in March 2019. The campaign collected sweaty clothing from garden workers, vacuum-packed it, and sold the packages through urban vending machines to dramatise the sensory experience of the spring season.
Sam Hibbard directed the film for Hornbach through Anorak Film, Berlin. Hibbard's approach used a deadpan documentary visual style to let the absurdist premise unfold without embellishment. The editing was handled by Ben Campbell at Cut + Run, with Chief Creative Officers Guido Heffels and Matthias Storath leading the Heimat creative team.
The 15-second online cut of the campaign accumulated close to three million YouTube views within one month of its March 2019 release, according to horizont.net, and led German YouTube advertising charts at that time. No broader verified campaign performance data, including paid media metrics or sales figures, is publicly available.
Heimat won the Hornbach account in a 2000 pitch, according to horizont.net, and began running campaigns continuously from 2001. By the time 'How Spring Smells' was released in March 2019, horizont.net described the agency-client relationship as approximately 19 years old, making it one of Germany's most sustained retail advertising partnerships.
Hornbach avoided conventional spring retail montage in favour of sensory, absurdist storytelling. Rather than promoting products or prices, Heimat dramatised the physical experience of outdoor labour. This approach differentiated Hornbach from DIY competitors such as Leroy Merlin and Kingfisher brands, which typically lead spring communications with category-level product advertising.
Hornbach describes itself as the third-largest player in the European DIY retail segment, according to insightdiy.co.uk, operating across nine countries. In Germany, its primary market, the brand competes against Groupe Adeo's Leroy Merlin and Kingfisher's Castorama, differentiating primarily through brand identity and emotionally driven advertising rather than promotional pricing.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
