Peter Figge has been CEO of independent creative agency Jung von Matt since 2010. For almost 30 years he has lived in Hamburg, the city where Holger Jung and Jean-Remy von Matt originally founded the company in 1991.

While the Hamburg office remains Jung von Matt’s largest site, Figge says he often reminds people that it represents only 500 out of a total of 1,400 staff and so the majority of the agency headcount is now elsewhere. For Figge, this sense of perspective comes in useful. If nothing else, his statistic attempts to dispel the kind of navel-gazing that can easily befall a head office. 

As the numbers suggest, Jung von Matt now has considerable international reach. The initial period of the agency’s expansion occurred within Germany itself, with the establishment of a second office in Frankfurt, before the company moved into Munich, Berlin, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart. This is a feat that many foreign agencies have struggled to pull off, Figge says.

The main issue for outsiders, he explains, is that Germany is a strongly federal country and to succeed here means being present in multiple cities, not just one or two. Added to this is the idea that if a company wants “to crack Europe from the outside, you always have to crack Germany,” Figge says. “That’s something that we tend to forget.”