A cola company that started in a Hamburg flat.
Fritz-Kola is a German cult cola founded by two students in their flat with €7,000 between them. We made a 2-minute animated founder's-story film for their 20th anniversary — equal parts history, manifesto and love letter.
Tell a 20-year story in two minutes.
Fritz-Kola's history is dense — two friends, a kitchen experiment, a near-bankruptcy, a turnaround, a country-wide cult following, an international rollout. The brief was to compress all of it into two minutes that felt human, not corporate.
And the film had to read on a phone, screen at trade events, and live on YouTube without feeling like three different things.
Animate it like a memory, not a documentary.
We sketched the whole story in scratchy hand-drawn animation — the kind that feels like remembering rather than documenting. The two founders are caricatured from real photos but kept loose; the city of Hamburg appears as a recurring backdrop with soft tonal shifts that mark the years passing.
"Watching it back, both founders cried. That's when I knew it was right."
The film travels.
The anniversary film was originally commissioned for a single trade event. It's since played at three festivals, been picked up as a case study by the German Design Council, and is now the asset Fritz-Kola open every internal kickoff with.