BWGTBLD in Campaign Germany
Campaign Germany spoke with our founder, Philipp Ramhofer, about where BWGTBLD is now and where it’s headed. Bärbel Egli-Unckrich wrote it. It’s the fullest account yet of the last two years: what changed, and the standard we didn’t.
The short version. BWGTBLD started in 2012 as two people making wedding and image films out of a timber house in Düsseldorf. It grew fast, moved to Berlin in 2016, and became internationally visible on the back of work like the Rimowa films with LeBron James and Roger Federer. At the end of 2024, co-founder Jakob Preischl left and Philipp bought back the shares and became sole owner.
What followed was a reset. We went from close to forty people to twenty-seven, and rebuilt the leadership around a group instead of a founding pair. The new management team is Philipp Ramhofer, Alexandra Sültemeyer, Marc Strass, Thomas Lohann, Emely Sudhaus, Nian Tang and Shane Patrick. Producers with two decades in the business sit next to people still hunting the next generation of directors.
The roster grew with it. We now represent Smuggler’s directors in Germany, which opened a door the other way too, taking our own directors into the US. In the last six months we signed Sara Dunlop, Tom Noakes, Julien & Quentin, Zhang & Knight, Oscar-nominated Vincent René-Lortie, and Olivia De Camps, whose “The Periodic Fable” for The Ordinary took a Grand Prix at Cannes Lions. This year’s work runs from Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Telekom to Zalando, Vinted, Google and On, increasingly straight from the brand with no agency in between.
On AI, our position is calm. We employ two full-time developers and build our own apps and tools. Where AI helps the work, we use it, across the whole process. What we won’t make are films with the compromise showing. As Philipp put it to Campaign: “Cheaper and faster is never an excuse for worse.”
Underneath all of it, two things haven’t moved: creativity and production quality. They’re the only currencies we trade in. It’s why we still put a seven-figure sum into passion projects, from the Troye Sivan “Rush” video to work that’s earned Grammy and Latin Grammy nominations. On jobs we’re service providers and we get paid. The art, we make on the side, with our own money.
That standard is also on the walls. Our office, in a landmarked Alfred Messel building in Berlin-Mitte, doubles as a gallery, and four times a year we open it for talks, screenings and performances.
In Campaign’s words, in this new shape, BWGTBLD is back to its best.
Photo: Marius Knieling
Read the full feature, in German, here.
