Hornbach Turns a Goth Teenager Into a Brief for Her Father

The German DIY Market and the Nonconformist Insight Behind Hornbach Hammer

Hornbach operates in a German home-improvement retail sector defined by fierce competition and narrow differentiation on product range and price. Germany's DIY market in 2014 featured OBI as the category's structural leader — according to a retailer-ranking account cited by marketingsociety.com, OBI held more than 354 stores as of 2016, indicating its dominant footprint around 2014 — while Bauhaus ranked second in the same period, per a 2014 retailer-ranking account noted by linkedin.com. Against these competitors, Hornbach ranked first in a 2014 consumer and retailer assessment covering Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, though the precise ranking methodology requires caution, as noted in research sourced from statista.com.

The strategic insight Heimat identified was not about product superiority. It was about what DIY work actually means to the person doing it. Guido Heffels, Creative Director and Co-Chief Executive of Heimat Berlin, articulated the campaign's underlying philosophy in an interview published by horizont.net on August 27, 2014: the work carried, in his words, a humanist concern beyond conventional home-improvement instruction — one of tolerance toward the individual and the nonconformist. He connected the film explicitly to broader social developments in German culture, framing the campaign as a reflection of real tensions between conformity and self-expression playing out across society.

That positioning allowed Hornbach to occupy territory in the German retail landscape that neither OBI nor Bauhaus had claimed: the idea that choosing to do a project is itself a moral and emotional act. The campaign's narrative — a father who speaks through action rather than argument — gave Hornbach's platform 'No one feels it like you do' its sharpest articulation to date, extending a creative lineage that Heimat had established with the 2011 'Symphony' campaign, as documented by wuv.de, and tracing back to the original 'Orka' work of 2001, per new-business.de.

Craft and Narrative Construction in Heimat's Hornbach Film

The film executes its argument without dialogue. A goth teenager moves through a small German town that rejects her aesthetic identity; her father, a Hornbach customer by implication, responds not with words but by painting the family home entirely black. The act is visible, permanent, and communal — a project that says everything a conversation could not.

Guido Heffels, who served as Creative Director and Co-Chief Executive of Heimat Berlin, described the directorial philosophy to horizont.net on August 27, 2014, noting that while a broad thematic brief existed, the creative team ultimately allowed the story to unfold organically — letting it happen, in his phrase. That deliberate looseness of control produced a film with the texture of observed behaviour rather than constructed advertising. The production company credited for the film is Trigger Happy Productions, whose involvement is recorded in the campaign's archive documentation.

Horizont reviewed the film twice in late August 2014. The August 27 review, as cited by benjaminmohr.com, described the work as 'ungewöhnlich und emotional' — unusual and emotional — identifying the film as the campaign's centrepiece. The August 29 review, also cited by benjaminmohr.com, characterised the approach as 'starkes und mutiges Storytelling' — strong and courageous storytelling — and placed it fourth in a weekly selection of Germany's most notable campaigns at that moment. Both assessments pointed to the same quality: a refusal to resolve emotional conflict through product logic, instead allowing the project itself to carry the full weight of meaning.

The visual language reinforces this restraint. The black-painted house functions as a single, legible symbol whose meaning requires no explanation within the film's world. That clarity of image — one action, one statement, one relationship — reflects Heimat's consistent craft preference across its Hornbach work: narrative compression that generates emotional amplitude from a minimum of expository material.

Awards and Structural Effectiveness of the Hornbach 'Say it with your project' Film

No verified audience performance data for 'Say it with your project' — such as reach figures, view counts, or sales attribution — is publicly available for independent citation. What the public record does confirm is the campaign's standing within the German and European creative and effectiveness communities, which provides a structural proxy for its impact.

ADC Germany awarded the campaign its Grand Prix in 2014, alongside additional gold, silver, and bronze awards for Heimat across further categories, as recorded by mitglieder.adc.de. The Grand Prix represents the highest honour ADC Germany confers and is awarded selectively; its attribution to 'Hornbach Hammer' signals peer recognition of creative leadership within the German market. Separately, the GWA Effie Awards 2014 granted the campaign a Gold award, as confirmed by research cited across benjaminmohr.com and award documentation. The Effie criterion is marketing effectiveness rather than creative craft alone, making the Gold award a meaningful indicator that the campaign's emotional architecture translated into measurable business outcomes in Germany, even if the specific metrics underpinning that award are not publicly disclosed.

Structurally, the film's effectiveness rests on its precision of emotional target. By staging the father's act as a response to social exclusion — a universal experience given a specifically German small-town context — the campaign reached beyond its core DIY audience without abandoning the product category. The project remains the hero. That structural discipline, where brand purpose and product behaviour are inseparable, is the quality that Heimat's multi-decade relationship with Hornbach has consistently produced and that this film delivers at its highest pitch.