KreativSchmëdd is not a company that grew out of a single idea or one specific field of activity. Rather, over many years, exactly those things that belong to us today have gradually come together: publishing, design, printing and development. Behind all of these areas is experience that did not begin with the founding of the company, but existed long before. Books, design, typesetting, production, technical solutions, websites, communication and project development were already part of everyday life before they became KreativSchmëdd. The actual founding was therefore less a beginning from scratch than the moment when many things that had already been connected finally received a common name.

At the centre of it all are first and foremost Heng Ries and Frank D. Matvos, who built KreativSchmëdd together and continue to shape the company today. Heng brings not only the entrepreneurial side to the business, but also knows many processes from an author’s perspective. Through his own book projects, he knows very well what the development of a work feels like when an idea becomes a manuscript and eventually a finished book. Frank comes from the worlds of design and publishing and has been working for decades with books, texts, typesetting, design, production and the development of visual and technical solutions. What unites them above all is the belief that good projects rarely come about when everyone simply takes care of their own small area. Much develops through conversation, disagreement, thinking things through together and sometimes also by completely discarding an originally planned solution and starting again from a different angle.

KreativSchmëdd, however, has long been about more than Heng and Frank. Behind the projects are employees, freelancers, partners and people with very different skills who join in wherever their experience is needed. Precisely because our work connects such different areas, no one can cover everything alone. Design requires different skills from print production, book development different ones from programming, and a good technical solution requires something different again from the personal support of an author or customer. That is why we do not see our team as a rigid structure with as many titles and levels of hierarchy as possible, but as people with different strengths working together towards a result. Anyone involved in a project at KreativSchmëdd should not disappear somewhere behind a corporate structure. We want to show who these people are, what they do and what part they contribute to our work.

A very important part of KreativSchmëdd is also our authors. Without them, a large part of what defines our publishing work would not exist at all. They bring us their stories, experiences, thoughts and often many months or years of work. Some come with a finished manuscript, others while they are still right in the middle of developing it. Some need support with design, typesetting or production, while others mainly want a publisher at their side who takes care of the organisational and technical matters for them. For us, authors are therefore not just names in a publishing programme and certainly not interchangeable suppliers of manuscripts. Behind every book is a person, and behind every person is a story of their own. These are exactly the people we want to gradually introduce on our website as well, together with their books and the projects that are created at KreativSchmëdd.

The fact that publishing, design, printing and development all come together under one roof is no coincidence. In everyday work, these areas constantly overlap. A manuscript becomes a book for which a cover has to be designed, a typesetting concept developed and the right production method found. From that, a website can emerge, a trade fair presence, advertising or an entirely new project. With a company, the collaboration may begin with a logo and eventually lead to printed materials, a website or an individually developed technical solution. We do not want to separate these transitions artificially just because they could be assigned to different departments organisationally. What matters to us is what a project needs and who within our team is the right person for it.

We do not spend all our time sitting behind desks waiting for files to arrive. A large part of our work develops through personal contact. We speak with authors and customers, travel to meet them, meet partners, spend time in printing plants, accompany production processes, attend events and trade fairs and look at things where they are actually happening. Sometimes a question can be resolved over the phone, sometimes it takes a screen, and sometimes you simply need to stand in front of something together to understand what is meant. That closeness is part of KreativSchmëdd for us, because behind every commission is someone who will later have to work with the result, live with it or recognise themselves in it.

For us, KreativSchmëdd is therefore less the sum of individual business areas than the sum of the people involved in it. Heng and Frank created the framework, but it is filled by a team, by partners, by authors, by customers and by all the ideas that are added every day. Some of those ideas begin very concretely, others with a sentence, a sketch or an idea that no one can quite describe yet. That is exactly where our work develops from. And perhaps that also explains best why the sentence that stands above KreativSchmëdd fits us so well: **An idea rarely comes into the world fully formed.**