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Hornbach Unleashes Its Garden to Sell the Gardening Season
Hornbach's Unleashed is a humorous 2022 spring campaign created by Heimat Berlin for the German DIY retail chain, in which a neglected garden steals its owner's car and drives itself to the nearest Hornbach store, dramatising the brand's tagline: Come to HORNBACH. Before your garden does.
Launched in Germany and across the broader DACH region on March 26, 2022, following a teaser phase that began on March 18, the campaign centres on a single hero film running 2 minutes and 14 seconds. The premise is deliberately absurdist: untended plants reach a breaking point, commandeer a vehicle, and cause suburban chaos — knocking over bins, frightening animals, and producing what the film characterises as vomiting bushes — before making their chaotic journey to the nearest store. The narrative is designed to entertain while delivering a clear retail call to action targeted at homeowners and gardening enthusiasts at the precise moment the gardening season begins.
The campaign extends well beyond the hero film. Creative extensions documented by Muse by Clios include two behind-the-scenes spots, a three-part Scary Stories series, and a separate execution focused on Hornbach's permanent low-price positioning. Media placements spanned cinema, television, out-of-home formats including 18/1 posters, city-light panels, digital out-of-home, and ambient installations, alongside social media, point of sale, radio, and banner advertising, according to reporting by Ads of the World and house-of-communication.com. This multi-channel footprint positioned Unleashed as a full-season platform rather than a single broadcast moment, reinforcing Hornbach's identity as the number one project hardware store in Germany and underscoring its expertise during a critical retail window.
Hornbach operates in a German DIY retail sector defined by intense competition and strong seasonal sales cycles. The German top-20 DIY retail sector reached €38.436 billion in 2022, growing 5.8 percent year over year, according to diyonline.de. Within that landscape, rivals OBI and Bauhaus each recorded approximately €4.4 billion in German DIY sales during the same period, also per diyonline.de, establishing a highly competitive midfield that Hornbach must continuously outmanoeuvre on both price and brand salience.
The strategic insight behind Unleashed is rooted in seasonal consumer behaviour. Spring represents the single most commercially significant period for house and garden retailers in Germany, when homeowners re-engage with outdoor projects after winter. Heimat Berlin's creative strategy exploited the universal anxiety of garden neglect — the feeling that the garden has gotten away from you — and externalised it as literal, chaotic consequence. By anthropomorphising the neglected garden and giving it agency, the campaign transforms a mundane consumer truth into an entertainment event, a technique consistent with Hornbach's long-standing brand voice.
This approach reflects a broader pattern in Hornbach's advertising lineage. The agency relationship between Hornbach and Heimat, which began in 2001 with the Orka campaign according to reporting documented via clapboard.com, had by 2022 accumulated over two decades of brand-building. An earlier spring initiative, How Spring Smells from March 2019, was characterised by The Stable as Hornbach's first spring-focused campaign, establishing the seasonal territory that Unleashed later expanded into surrealist comedy. Positioning the garden itself as protagonist in 2022 escalated that creative ambition meaningfully, arriving in a market where entertainment value increasingly differentiates retail advertising from price-led competitors.
Director collective Traktor helmed the Unleashed hero film, bringing a kinetic visual language to a premise that required seamless integration of practical performance, creature effects, and post-production illusion. The film was produced by Stink Berlin and shot by director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle, whose credits include work recognised at the highest levels of international cinema, lending Unleashed a cinematic quality uncommon in retail advertising.
Post-production was handled by Katalyst, with VFX supervisor Steffen Röthinger overseeing the visual effects work that brought the garden's behaviour — including the film's defining vomiting-bush sequence — to screen. Colouring was completed by Jean-Clement Soret at Company 3, whose grade unified the film's tonal shift between suburban mundanity and surreal spectacle. Editing was carried out by Rick Russell at Final Cut London, a credit documented by both Muse by Clios and Ads of the World, and the cut's pacing is central to the film's comedic timing, controlling when chaos escalates and when the film breathes.
Music was composed by Dan Corbin and Mike Austin, produced by Clare McGrath, and delivered through Finger Music and Sound Design in London, as attributed by Muse by Clios. Sound design was handled by Alex Bingham and Nigel Mannion, a detail confirmed via linkedin.com production credits. The sonic architecture of the film reinforces its tonal ambition: the score must simultaneously support suburban comedy, action-sequence energy, and the brand's confident retail identity. The complete production roster — spanning Berlin, London, and international post-production houses — reflects the scale of investment Hornbach committed to making the 2022 spring campaign an entertainment-grade piece of branded content rather than a conventional retail commercial.
Hornbach's Unleashed campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100, reflecting a strong creative execution that balances entertainment with commercial clarity. The campaign registered over 6,000 views alongside positive audience interactions in documented channels, as noted in Clapboard's campaign records. No independently verified third-party performance data — such as brand-lift studies, sales attribution figures, or media reach metrics — for the Unleashed campaign is publicly available beyond these figures.
Structural analysis supports the campaign's effectiveness on several grounds. The 134-second runtime exceeds standard broadcast formats, yet the film sustains narrative momentum through escalating absurdity and tight editing, reducing drop-off risk. The tagline Come to HORNBACH. Before your garden does. functions as a direct retail call to action embedded within a comic premise, meaning entertainment and conversion intent coexist without friction. Deployment across cinema, television, out-of-home, radio, and digital channels during the spring retail window — a period when the German house and garden category is at peak consumer demand — amplified the film's reach beyond any single medium.
The campaign's creative extensions, including the three-part Scary Stories series and behind-the-scenes content documented by Muse by Clios, extended dwell time with the Hornbach brand across the campaign period. This layered content strategy reflects an understanding that a single hero film, however strong, benefits from surrounding material that sustains audience engagement through the full gardening season in Germany.
Unleashed is a 2022 spring campaign by Hornbach in which a neglected garden steals its owner's car and drives to a Hornbach store. Created by Heimat Berlin and produced by Stink Berlin, the 134-second humorous film ran across Germany and the DACH region from March 26, 2022, targeting homeowners at the start of the gardening season.
Director collective Traktor directed Unleashed for Hornbach in 2022. Director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle shot the film, with editing by Rick Russell at Final Cut London and VFX by Katalyst under supervisor Steffen Röthinger, as documented by Muse by Clios and Ads of the World.
Heimat Berlin created Hornbach's Unleashed spring campaign in 2022. The agency had maintained a relationship with Hornbach since 2001, beginning with the Orka campaign, according to clapboard.com, making Unleashed part of a collaboration spanning more than two decades of brand-building in the German market.
Hornbach's Unleashed ran across cinema, television, out-of-home formats including digital out-of-home and city-light panels, social media, radio, point of sale, and banner advertising, according to Ads of the World and house-of-communication.com. The campaign launched in Germany and across the DACH region from March 18 through March 26, 2022.
Unleashed builds on Hornbach's established pattern of spring campaigns in Germany. An earlier initiative, How Spring Smells from March 2019, was characterised by The Stable as the brand's first spring-focused campaign. Unleashed escalated that creative territory into surrealist comedy, maintaining Hornbach's reputation for entertainment-driven retail advertising distinct from price-led competitors like OBI and Bauhaus.
The tagline for Hornbach's Unleashed campaign is Come to HORNBACH. Before your garden does. The line functions as both a humorous narrative payoff and a direct retail call to action, urging German homeowners to visit Hornbach proactively at the start of the 2022 gardening season rather than letting their gardens deteriorate further.
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