Sonder Studio brands VERITAS to honour a factory’s past and future

In Wittenberge, a small town between Berlin and Hamburg, the former VERITAS sewing machine factory is being turned into an urban district of hotels, restaurants, offices and event spaces, conceived to gather creatives from the arts, technology, science and business. The plant was built in 1903 and was Europe’s largest sewing machine factory until closing in 1991 – leaving around 3,000 people without jobs. To give the revival a brand strategy, visual identity and verbal identity, Berlin-based Sonder Studio was tasked with carrying the VERITAS name into its new chapter, making the long-term vision tangible before the physical transformation was complete. “The concept of time was everywhere in this project,” Co-founder & Design Director Caroline Kasper tells us. “The VERITAS brand had to look like it had always been there – and like it was only getting started.” For the studio, the VERITAS story was close to home. “Both of Sonder Studio’s founders grew up in small towns in former East Germany,” Kasper explains, familiar with the decay and devaluation that followed reunification in beautiful small towns. That is why it “mattered so much to us not to skin this site with a faceless, tone-deaf real estate identity,” she adds, wary of the sensitivity people hold towards wealthy outsiders arriving and changing things without respect for what was already there. The identity also had to be relevant to both a local audience and a global one at the same time. “Authenticity travels remarkably well,” notes Shilpanjali Sunita Rao, Head of Research & Founder’s Associate at VERITAS, its strength coming precisely from the fact that it belongs to Wittenberge rather than borrowing the visual language of technology campuses or global developments. From that footing came the brand’s motto, ‘Forever Evolving,’ and its claim on the district’s purpose as a ‘Space for Big Ideas.’