an outpouring of support from the international creative community<\/a> 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\u2019s EMEA operation, turned media-business investor via FNE Group.<\/p>\nImprobably enough, the relaunch has also lined up perfectly with an already-planned move, from that famous old church to\u2026 another church, this time a former monastery in the city\u2019s red light district.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
From one angle, Slijpen says, the bankruptcy was a symptom of an \u201cindustry-wide issue.\u201d He tells us: \u201cAgencies are struggling. It\u2019s not the 90s any more.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n Want to go deeper? Ask The Drum<\/p>\n
De Jonge says that independent agencies have lost their \u201cfinancial buffer\u201d as they\u2019ve seen their \u201cpiece of the pie becoming smaller\u201d over time. \u201cTo 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 \u2013 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
From another angle, what took the shop down was the oldest fear in the agency book: client losses landing at the same time. \u201cWhat we didn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/kesselskramer-1785833017.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Those three losses hit hard, but here\u2019s the scary part: KesselsKramer wasn\u2019t an agency on the rocks \u2013 until it was. \u201cWe weren\u2019t rotting at all,\u201d says Slijpen. Four projects from the agency went live, in fact, in that short three-week window between redundancy and rebirth. \u201cCycling into Amsterdam and passing fresh work that we were really proud of \u2013 it felt really strange.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 before quickly agreeing on what Slijpen calls an \u201cunexpectedly good\u201d feeling around the offer from Boon.<\/p>\n
Through that period, the agency had one clear priority: \u201cThe most important thing is that the company stays independent,\u201d says De Jonge. \u201cWe\u2019ve always been an independent agency, so we can do whatever we want and what we feel is good work. This restart is no different.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s been pleasantly surprised by how many have done the opposite. \u201cI didn\u2019t expect it at all. All of a sudden, you\u2019re a kind of unstable factor in their lives; it feels like you\u2019ve become a risk\u2026 But there was a lot of goodwill. They just said, \u2018Get your shit together and let\u2019s continue. See you in a couple of weeks.\u2019 It\u2019s not like everyone wants to get their hands off you, or that it\u2019s a sinking ship and everyone jumps off.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cinteresting punch in the face.\u201d<\/p>\n
She says: \u201cAll of a sudden, you are just out of the fields and you\u2019re nothing. It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s good in changing with the times and to get things sharp again.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cThere\u2019s an enormous demand for an agency like us. \u2018Advertising for people who don’t like advertising\u2019 \u2013 that\u2019s what we live by and that also gave us the strength that maybe we have to do things a little bit different.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alongside those industry peers, there\u2019s 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\u2019s third former creative partner and a partner until June, was one of a handful who decided not to re-emerge with the agency. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing but pride there,\u201d he tells The Drum. \u201cI\u2019m very happy that it continues. It\u2019s a nice thought that it lives on. It was a great chapter, but now I\u2019m starting a new one.\u201d<\/p>\n
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: \u201cYou should never make anything that you don\u2019t believe in\u2026 We never made any concessions in our creativity, no matter the client.\u201d<\/p>\n
And perhaps most foundational of all to the agency\u2019s DNA: independence. \u201cI\u2019m quite optimistic about the future for independent creative thinking. There\u2019s more place for it the more things get automated and the more things get consolidated into big creative powerhouses. I\u2019ve 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\u2019s a mindset and that mindset is very important in the industry these days. Otherwise, everything will become grey in the end.\u201d<\/p>\n
On this, the relaunched KesselsKramer and its newly-released free agent agree: \u201cRunning an independent business is always worth the price.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The iconic Amsterdam agency closed its (church) doors back in June. Then, three weeks later, a new version…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":140232,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[101],"tags":[29183,67290,199,67292,67293,200,67291],"class_list":["post-140231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-amsterdam","tag-agencies","tag-agency-leadership","tag-amsterdam","tag-erik-kessels","tag-independent-agencies","tag-netherlands","tag-summer-of-agency-love"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/117037176483899458","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140231\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}