Different. The Nimbus Group is different from most other enterprises – and has been for over 25 years. You can see it in a lot of telling details. For example in the campaign in which Nimbus employees proudly presented themselves as “originals” in larger-than-life portrayals on huge advertising spaces to take a stand on the subject of plagiarism on behalf of their company. Or in the Electronics Inventors Club for schoolchildren with a keen interest in technology. Or in the zero-emission delivery vehicles that run in and around Stuttgart on electricity generated by the firm’s own solar power system.

However, nowhere is the company‘s differentness more apparent than in its canteen: every morning at 10 o‘ clock all 160 employees meet to take breakfast together. The warehouseman next to the controller. Designers next to development engineers. Lighting designers next to packers. Salespeople, interns, clerks, marketing experts, architects, interior designers, electricians, acoustics specialists. Company CEO Dietrich F. Brennenstuhl is among those to take a seat at any one of the tables in the room and he is the one who provides the coffee and tea, different kinds of bread, butter, chocolate spread, jam and honey. The walls of the canteen are adorned with a quote that sums up the company philosophy: “I DO NOT SEEK – I FIND. Seeking is when you start from old things. And in the new find what is already familiar. Finding is something completely new…”.

Originally founded as Nimbus Design GmbH in Stuttgart in 1988, the Nimbus Group – a manufacturer of LED luminaires (Nimbus brand) and technology-driven acoustically effective room partitioning systems (Rossoacoustic brand) – has explored new avenues. They have done so by doing things differently – and a lot of the time they were right. The enterprise was the first to place its faith in LED technology for innovative lighting solutions, giving itself a global lead even ahead of the large corporations. Since 2006 Nimbus has realised around 8,000 LED projects and can now call upon a wealth of experience unique among its competitors: the spectrum ranges from fitting out houses, doctors‘ practices, galleries, schools, town hall foyers, boardrooms and lounges through to complete office buildings and large company headquarters like the Unilever head office and the Chamber of Commerce in Hamburg, the ADAC headquarters in Munich and the recently completed head office of the World Trade Organisation in Geneva.

Images courtesy of Retail Design Blog