Just 13 years at sea.
If something doesn't exist already, they'll create it.
Creative spirit in the blood.
Ivan's passion for tinkering with things made itself known at an early age: "Already when I was a child, I didn't play with my toys, I always used to take them apart," he explains. Ivan didn't study and didn't follow an apprenticeship – he's self-taught. And despite this, he's been successful from early on and has even brought several of his inventions to patent-ready status. Among his customers are household names like IBM and the Fraunhofer Institute. Ivan finished the first 20 of his projects entirely in his own garage – using a lathe and a small CNC milling machine. But all of the projects have one thing in common: the result was always unique. 18 years ago he developed a TFT plasma screen for IBM which allowed their exhibition stand to be discovered virtually in 3D. For Jägermeister, he built a 17-metre-high tower of liquor bottles which was equipped with 219 LED screens.
The idea of living in a container.
Containerwerk turns shipping containers into sustainable living spaces.
Looking back, Ivan says: "By teaching yourself lots of things, on the one hand you're untainted, but on the other hand, you have to take a new approach for every single topic." Upon completing the projects, he didn't just gain more experience, he also got a taste for creating sustainable products. The brainwave came to Ivan during another project which he worked on with the Fraunhofer Institute. The task in question was to create the hotel room of the future – in a shipping container. Little by little, it became clear that it was actually possible to transform a steel container into a comfortable and luxurious hotel room. Ivan was so impressed by the result that his passion for containers was awakened and the foundations thus laid for Containerwerk. Containerwerk now employs 20 people. Their production facilities are located in Wassenberg, near Mönchengladbach on a 30,000-square-metre terrain.
The key is in mobility.
Photos:
Fabian Freitag, Luis Tonhäuser
More links to discover:
Containerwerk - https://www.containerwerk.com, @Facebook, @Instagram