Tag Archives: cool hunting

On Tour – P&G And The Mini Disco

We’re not exaggerating when we claim we know what’s cool in Berlin. As true Berlinagenten it’s our job to know – and to find out. The scene is always changing and new trends emerge faster in Berlin than people get rejected at Berghain on a Saturday night. Every day we’re roaming Berlin’s streets with our coolness radar in hands and wait until it violently starts beeping. We offer the same service to companies with our specially tailored Cool Hunting Tours.

When Procter&Gamble‘s Japan division asked us to be their hunting-partners in crime, we couldn’t say no! Of course P&G is especially interested in finding Berlin’s hairy trends. Viktor Leske’s contemporary hair saloons are what’s hot right now – they offer a minimal, sleek design that goes perfectly with the typical Berlin understatement.

In the Bikini mall our customers didn’t only hunt trends, they became trend setters. At LNFA Concept Store they were to choose their own set of super trendy clothing and experienced what it’s like to be a model first hand. Each and everyone became part of a cool photo shooting and we looked like a kinky group of Kreuzberg fashionistas when the photos were shot.

The coolest part of the day was our session in the world’s smallest club on the RAW premises. If you toss in a coin in on old telephone cell, a disco ball appears, lights start flashing, party music starts playing and smoke machines do the rest to create an instant party atmosphere. Some things only exist in Berlin…

On Tour – Berlin’s Booming Beauty Scene

The beauty scene didn’t always have an easy life in Berlin. In a city where it’s common to just hop in your joggers to do your daily errands – or even go clubbing – opening a beauty store once was a dreary venture. But with Berlin rising high on international popularity scales, the city’s face is undergoing constant change. To be precise: Berlin now wears make up, a 100€ hair cut and has a secret loathing for barber shops.

When the Nordic branch of a world wide beauty company asked us to show them the hippest & upcoming spots in the beauty scene, we put our joggers aside and proudly presented Berlin’s latest feel-good oases in one of our popular cool-hunting tours.

We visited an exclusive range of Barber Shops like BeardyBoys and Wheadon, where especially men can get their beauty game on – anything from beauty products to hairdressing and shaving is on the menu. As befitting for the topic, we paid hommage to a whole range of beautifying institutions, such as The Store or Jacks Beauty Department. The trend definitely goes towards creating fancy All-In-One stores, where beauty customers get all their wishes fulfilled under the same roof.

But no Berlinagenten tour without a touch of glamour – between the stations we made a stop at the Platoon Art Hall, finding our way into a sercret bar, hidden in one of the containers. Our unexpecting customers had the Berlinagenten treatment coming towards them – everything is more fun after you’ve had a beer.

Finishing the tour, our guests already felt like Berlin beauty pros and got the chance to show off the day’s best pictures at a gala dinner at Soho House in the evening. The night ended as all nights should end – delicious cocktails, DJ Superzandy playing funky tunes and dancing until the feet hurt. Thanks for the amazing day!

On Tour – ICA

Berlin’s evergrowing food craze has made people from all over the world hungry for a taste of our bittersweet city! We were happy to show ICA the city’s tastiest spots with one of Berlinagenten’s infamous Cool Hunting Tours. These tours are focused on finding emerging trends, business innovations and the city’s currents of tomorrow. To make sure ICA’s needs were met perfectly, we put the tour’s emphasis on cool street food markets, delicious pop up events, charismatic bistros by the water, edgy little food shops and the emerging fine dining scene that create Berlin’s culinary diversity.

We slipped into the role of Sherlock Holmes himself (well, a modern, food-obsessed version of Sherlock maybe). Armed with polaroid cameras and given the task to uncover the secrets of hidden concept stores, organic food stores, delicacy shops and urban fast food markets, our enthusiastic food detectives dived into a sea of tasty treats and took the journey into the city’s vivid culinary core. Our exclusive selection of hip food locations such as Neue Heimat, the legendary Turkish market at Maybachufer and organic super markets like the LPG Bio Market or Biocompany made sure the next tongue-pleasers were never far away.

Berlin takes a leading position when it comes to fresh designs and innovative food impressions and we take a special pride in leading you to the most extraordinary concept stores the city offers, just so you can take home the inspiration you need to get on with your ideas!

In the end though, it’s much more satisfying to see the delicacies on your plate than in front of your camera. For our following Riverside Gastro Rallye we handpicked restaurants like insider’s tip Volt and Sage Restaurant, where we were served one course per restaurant before hopping to the next – a wonderful way to pick up the vibe in different part of the cities.

Now we wouldn’t Berlinagenten if we hadn’t finished off the day with an appropriate portion of glamour, so after some extensive bar hopping our connections helped us jump queues and dance until we could dance no more in the famous house club Avenue! Just one Berlinagenten tour is already bound to blow your mind, but three in one day…? You’ll never look at Berlin the same away again!

Global Hot Spots – Dubai and Muscat, Oman

Dubai

If you want the best shopping, restaurants and luxury hotels, automatically you may think of New York, but now it’s time to look to the East. In less than six to seven hours flying time from Europe, you reach a new metropolis, built more or less yesterday but it actually feels like Utopia.

Berlinagenten visited Dubai for the fifth time to see how this new hub between Asia and Europe is developing. At first sight, it’s clear that Dubai is a show-off fairy tale built by a real life Sheik. First impressions last and they are all BIG. Playfully built skyscrapers touch the clouds (they boast the highest in the world – Burj Kalifa), multi dimensional shopping malls spread across the landscape like viruses (fact: the biggest in the world is Dubai Mall) and the insane city developments (the biggest man made island in the world is The Palms) abound at a pace.

With all of this there is one key theme: luxury! Whether it’s shopping, hotels, restaurants, bars or a club, you will be impressed by what you can build with an obscene amount of (washed) money. The police are even driving Lamborghini’s here, in order to catch fast driving rich kids in Porches!

Here are some of Berlinagenten’s top picks from our last cool hunting trip in February:

Top new hotels

New hotspots

New Clubs:

Our favourite restaurants

Dubai´s crazy future plans:

A copy of India’s Taj Mahal but four times bigger than the real one!
A shopping mall with 2500 shops/boutiques. The Dubai Mall only has 1200.
‘The world’ consisting of artificial islands, shaped like the earth from a bird’s perspective. The Scandinavian part will be covered with a huge glass dome and inside will be snow and ice.

Now for a completely different world – Muscat, Oman.

A short flight away from Dubai is the quiet and relaxed city of Muscat. The old town boasts lots of beautiful traditional architecture. When you drive around the old port, the souk and the square in front of Al Alam Palace, it feels like you’re in the movie ‘A Thousand & One Arabian Nights’.

The contrast of red dark coloured mountains, which surrounds the almost white old town is an impressive setting from the hills, as well as from inside the square. Don’t come here if you expect the same infrastructure as Dubai. There aren’t endless luxurious hotels or huge shopping malls. The new international airport is under construction and many international hotels are on the way. Yet the Sultane doesn’t want to build Disneyland. This is a low-key cultural oriented destination, with the must-see Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque and the Royal Opera House Muscat.

Here are some of Berlinagenten’s top picks.

Hotels:

Global destination: Yangon, Burma

If there’s one place that you simply must visit before its on everybody radar, it is Yangon (once known as Mynamar), the capital of Burma. Romantic, historic and now peaceful, Yangon is the top emerging Asian destination of the moment. Once upon a time it was known as the Pearl of South East Asia but after decades of turmoil, the country was closed to the West. Now it’s reclaiming its crown. Still, the lack of tourists is palatable, you really feel as if you’re one of the first people to visit and discover the incredible number of colonial buildings and fairy tale Buddhist shrines, such as the Shwedagon Pagoda, whose golden spire dominates the skyline.

After seeing how mass cheap tourism affected their neighbouring counties, Yangon has very much targeted high-end travellers. We stayed in three five stars hotel to check out the range on offer. First off, we visited Governors Residence, part of the Orient Express group. Next, we moved to Hotel Strand, built by the Sarkie Brothers hotels in 1901, during the same period they were redefining luxury hotels with Raffles in Singapore and The Oriental in Penang. Finally, it was onto the first big five star hotel of Yangon Shangri La.

For all the beauty and luxury, what we will remember will be the abundant, high quality food. A sophisticated, highly original food culture exists incorporating British, Indian, Chinese, and Thai to make a fresh Burmese mix. Whether that’s buying from hawkers selling a fragrant noodle soup called Thoke for 50c at the food markets, or at the top end colonial era restaurants such as Monsoon Myanmar, or, the recently-opened luxurious Water Library in a colonial mansion. Other favourites include the hotspots for expats Union Restaurant or Le Planteur. Meanwhile, a perfect example of where Yangon is heading is the Bar Boon Dutch Deli and Expresso Bar, which expresses the cool trendy European deli á la NY style.

Top tip: Make a difference while you shop at the Helping Hands Loft Fashion & Accessories

This fair trade shop that opened in early 2012 and carries a variety of accessories, gifts and fashion whose proceeds directly benefit Myanmar artisans whose work supports local initiatives such as healthcare, housing and education. 85-87 Thinbyu Road

Berlinagenten on tour – Wella Japan rocks Berlin

Wella Japan have been bringing their clients to their headquarters in Darmstadt, Germany for years before taking them to London for a spot of trend hunting. But this year, they had got word that if you want to go cool hunting then it’s Berlin you should be visiting. Naturally it was Berlinagenten, they contacted to find out what is hot and happening in the city.

Berlinagenten started working on the project in August last year. It involved putting together a programme for 50 people. Four guides took the groups all over the city taking them to the coolest neighbhourhoods, bars, restaurants, shops and arts spaces. We organised behind the scenes visits to creative companies to inspire our clients imaginations, e.g. ic!berlin, Marcellvonberlin, Platoon, Lumas and Tausche. Each group was given a mission to capture on digital cameras, the most creative elements of the neighbourhood they were visiting.

After a few hours rest and some serious pimping up, our Japanese guests looked like superstars as we took them to Soho House for a banquet dinner. Each group presented their photographs and interpretations of what makes Berlin the coolest city in the world right now, to the rest of the touring party. Berlinagenten has converted another 50 people into Berlinophiles!