The iconic Amsterdam agency closed its (church) doors back in June. Then, three weeks later, a new version of the agency was reborn (in a different church). Its creative leadership give us the inside story.

Founded in 1996 by now-legendary Dutch admen Erik Kessels and Johan Kramer, Amsterdam creative shop KesselsKramer had an enviable 30-year run.

It was an agency that managed to have its cake and eat it too: from its Amsterdam HQ, it became a bastion of the city’s creative scene, responsible for the city-identity campaign ‘I Amsterdam.’ And with outposts at one point in both Los Angeles and London, it built a global reputation that led to write-ups like the one in Time magazine calling it a “legendary and unorthodox advertising agency.”

Independent throughout those three decades, it started 2026 like any other year, working with an enviable mix of local icons (such as the modern art powerhouse Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam) and global heavyweights like Stabilo.

Then, last month, the studio suddenly announced that it had filed for bankruptcy and would be closing its famous studio-in-a-church.

Cue an outpouring of support from the international creative community followed by three weeks of silence and then, just as sudden as its closure, an announcement that a phoenix had risen from the ashes: KesselsKramer would return with a slightly reduced crew and a new financial backer: Thijs Boon, the founder of Vice Benelux and former president of the publisher’s EMEA operation, turned media-business investor via FNE Group.

Improbably enough, the relaunch has also lined up perfectly with an already-planned move, from that famous old church to… another church, this time a former monastery in the city’s red light district.

Maartje Slijpen and Rens de Jonge, the creative directors who comprise the reborn creative leadership of the reborn agency, sat down with The Drum last week for their first interview since the events of June.

From one angle, Slijpen says, the bankruptcy was a symptom of an “industry-wide issue.” He tells us: “Agencies are struggling. It’s not the 90s any more.”

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De Jonge says that independent agencies have lost their “financial buffer” as they’ve seen their “piece of the pie becoming smaller” over time. “To be a very creative, almost boutique agency like KesselsKramer, that fights for creativity and does things in an unconventional way, is hard work. That level of creativity takes a lot of time – more and more time. Marketing teams have become bigger, so you have to have more arguments to be more original or more conventional, and you have to do it in less time and less money. To stay on that level takes more work.”

From another angle, what took the shop down was the oldest fear in the agency book: client losses landing at the same time. “What we didn’t see coming was that three big projects or clients pulled back in a row. We figured, one you can handle; two becomes quite a big problem; and three is the end.”

Those three losses hit hard, but here’s the scary part: KesselsKramer wasn’t an agency on the rocks – until it was. “We weren’t rotting at all,” says Slijpen. Four projects from the agency went live, in fact, in that short three-week window between redundancy and rebirth. “Cycling into Amsterdam and passing fresh work that we were really proud of – it felt really strange.”

For the leaders of the agency, those three weeks between closure and reopening were, of course, busy: not just cycling past launched work, but continuing to work through the bankruptcy proceedings and rapidly fielding bids for new backers – before quickly agreeing on what Slijpen calls an “unexpectedly good” feeling around the offer from Boon.

Through that period, the agency had one clear priority: “The most important thing is that the company stays independent,” says De Jonge. “We’ve always been an independent agency, so we can do whatever we want and what we feel is good work. This restart is no different.”

If the bad news for agencies is that the much-dreaded sudden insolvency can happen, the good news is that your assumptions of what might happen when the wave hits might be wrong. Clients, for example, you might expect them to go running from such difficulties. Slijpen says she’s been pleasantly surprised by how many have done the opposite. “I didn’t expect it at all. All of a sudden, you’re a kind of unstable factor in their lives; it feels like you’ve become a risk… But there was a lot of goodwill. They just said, ‘Get your shit together and let’s continue. See you in a couple of weeks.’ It’s not like everyone wants to get their hands off you, or that it’s a sinking ship and everyone jumps off.”

For Slijpen, the silver lining of the whole ordeal may be a distinctively creative one: just maybe, the experience of bankruptcy and near-collapse can be an “interesting punch in the face.”

She says: “All of a sudden, you are just out of the fields and you’re nothing. It’s not that we had grown really big egos, but if you start from scratch, you have a certain uncertainty that makes you run really hard. That’s what we have to do again. We have legacy, so we know what we like to do and how we like to work and how we want to create, but we also have to reinvent ourselves and I guess that’s good in changing with the times and to get things sharp again.”

Same name, similar team, new church: as KesselsKramer looks to its new future, much has changed, but much is the same, too. For De Jonge, one lesson from the last couple of months came in the form of the tens of thousands of messages, likes and comments that the agency has received, largely from its peers. “There’s an enormous demand for an agency like us. ‘Advertising for people who don’t like advertising’ – that’s what we live by and that also gave us the strength that maybe we have to do things a little bit different.”

Alongside those industry peers, there’s one, perhaps surprising, group that may be cheering on the new shop more than any other: its most recent former staff. Gijs van den Berg, the shop’s third former creative partner and a partner until June, was one of a handful who decided not to re-emerge with the agency. “There’s nothing but pride there,” he tells The Drum. “I’m very happy that it continues. It’s a nice thought that it lives on. It was a great chapter, but now I’m starting a new one.”

As van den Berg looks to set out on his own later this year, he says that the principles first taught to him by Erik Kessels and practiced by the agency Kessels built will remain foundational to his creative practice: “You should never make anything that you don’t believe in… We never made any concessions in our creativity, no matter the client.”

And perhaps most foundational of all to the agency’s DNA: independence. “I’m quite optimistic about the future for independent creative thinking. There’s more place for it the more things get automated and the more things get consolidated into big creative powerhouses. I’ve always been a sucker for the alternative, for a kind of fresh take on the normal. We need independent creatives to fight the status quo. Being independent is not just a way of doing business; it’s a mindset and that mindset is very important in the industry these days. Otherwise, everything will become grey in the end.”

On this, the relaunched KesselsKramer and its newly-released free agent agree: “Running an independent business is always worth the price.”