Our team

Who we are

House of Manus is backed by the Hotz Group, a Swiss-based international firm that grew out of Victor Hotz’s family printing business. Although its core business has long since shifted to brand consultancy and digital transformation services, the firm still has strong connections to its craft heritage. Today, the group includes Hieronymus, an artisan brand for exquisite stationery, while the Hotz Group also invests in the preservation of highly specialized typographical know-how. What’s more, thinking with both head and hand remains a hallmark of how the Steinhausen-based firm works.

Porträt Oliver Jahn

Chief Executive Officer & Chief Creative Officer

Oliver Jahn

The thing I remember most is the smell. My father used to have a basement workshop, where he would restore farmhouse furniture at weekends. It was filled with warped cabinets, chest of drawers and beds rescued from relatives’ sheds. Endless hours we spent scraping off thick crusts of paint, replacing frames, oiling hinges and massaging wax into wood, before the pieces then found a new home somewhere in our house.

So there was all that old furniture, and then there was my bookseller mother and my grandfather, who had a typesetting workshop in which, as a small boy, I discovered the “black art” of printing and composition using lead letters and angle hooks, this before I’d even learned to read. Since then, furniture and books have been the two key constants in my life, and what unites them is craftsmanship. Nothing fascinates me more than the array of things the human hand can craft. The fact that I didn’t end up being a carpenter or cabinetmaker was partly down to a desk I saw in an interiors magazine as a teenager. This I then attempted to reproduce at my dad’s workbench, but, for some reason, the cumbersome thing I cobbled together over several weeks had little in common with the light and elegant piece I’d admired in the photos. So I immersed myself in books, eventually graduating in literature and philosophy. Words became my tools of choice and the library my workshop. Since then, my professional life has revolved around the craft of creative hands.

For almost 20 years, I had the pleasure of shaping the work of AD Architectural Digest, as a journalist, then as editor-in-chief and then as a global director. Having in recent years led a major international transformation of this illustrious magazine brand, part of the New York-based Condé Nast media group, I felt a growing desire to apply my experience and expertise, the knowledge I’d gained via so many encounters and discoveries in so many places, to a new and meaningful challenge that seemed to have been calling me for years. Over the past two decades, I’ve visited countless artisan manufacturers around the world, and got to know the people behind them. Nothing has left a more lasting mark on me than the joy, pride and deep satisfaction they clearly felt when talking about their work. This has now inspired a mission to which I want to give my all, both as an entrepreneur and as an aficionado of the visual arts.

And so I’ve come full circle – back that elegant desk of my childhood, but also the lamp on it, the porcelain vase next to it, and the old Venetian glass tumbler on the other side – handcrafted objects that exude a particular aura you just want to reach out and touch, objects that enrich your life in everyday use. Craftsmanship, as American sociologist Richard Sennett wrote, is chiefly the desire to do a job well for its own sake. And that’s exactly what I hope to do in helping to build House of Manus.

“Pride in one’s work lies at the heart of craftsmanship as the reward for skill and commitment.”

Richard Sennett

Head of Investments, CFO & COO

Simon M. Ingold

I’m always happiest working in areas where different and seemingly contradictory worlds collide. It’s those collisions that spark new ideas and generate new momentum. When I first heard the vision for House of Manus, I was immediately sold. Integrating financial investment, transformational business development and craft-based training is a unique concept, one that brings together exactly the things that have always interested me.

Thanks to my parents, the cultural realm has been part of my life since the very beginning, though my career has taken a different trajectory. After studying in Switzerland and the US, I worked in international finance for ten years, then gained operational leadership experience in large and small businesses. I am also a regular columnist for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper and an author. My particular interest is in the interface between business, society and culture, and it’s here that House of Manus seeks to play its part. We want to be both an intelligent investor and an active agenda-setter, helping to shape a field that’s sure to see major upheaval in the years to come, the impacts of which are as yet unclear. My role at House of Manus is a unique opportunity to combine my professional expertise with my early influences and basic interests.

At House of Manus, our aim is to change the craft training landscape for the better, and to make craft socially relevant again. After all, craft has always lain at the heart of a culture’s identity, whatever the era and place. It deserves support, particularly in times of disruptive technological change. One thing’s for sure: if we are no longer makers, then we are mere consumers. That’s why craft is much more than just a business; it’s a philosophy. For me personally, it’s a great privilege to be part of that.

Porträt Simon Ingold
Porträt Andreas Kühnlein

Editorial Director

Andreas Kühnlein

The first place I saw something being crafted by hand with real skill was in my father’s workshop. He could transform a pile of two-by-fours into just about anything. He produced bookshelves, sheds, wall clocks and toy swords, all based on nothing but a few hand-drawn sketches. My dad loved to make stuff, and that’s a passion I share. I’m not nearly as skilled as him, but I inherited his conviction that if you can make a thing yourself, you should at least try, even if it’s just to understand it better.

The sense of self-empowerment that comes when you tap into your inner MacGyver has accompanied me throughout much of my career, even if most of it has been spent at a computer screen. I’ve always loved to learn how things are made and meet the people who make them – doing so is one of the great privileges of my profession. My own craft, if you can call it that, is storytelling. For over a decade, I honed this craft as an architectural journalist at AD Architectural Digest, and before that, at the Bauhaus in Dessau, which was my intellectual gateway to the world of architecture, design and the belief you can improve the world by making it more beautiful.

To this day, I have great respect for the talented dilettante, or the genius of the generalist, as Richard Buckminster Fuller would have called it. But equally, I have a deep appreciation of expert craftsmanship, and of the skilled hands and minds behind it. After all, you can enjoy trying to make things yourself while still recognizing the genuine expertise and artistry that come from years of dedicated practice and experience. In fact, it’s the combination of the two that makes the House of Manus concept so appealing to me – I’m fascinated by what dabblers can do when we put our minds and hands to it, but also in awe of what genuine masters of their craft can achieve.

Founder & owner Hotz Group

Fabian Hotz

I’ve always been fascinated by visual processes, the way the soul manifests itself in tangible, visible things. I grew up amidst throbbing Heidelberg presses, my fingers blackened with printer’s ink. My dad’s printworks was my playground and, from childhood on, I made it my home. Text was, first and foremost, something expressed via lead letters, content something cast in heavy metal and formed by masters of their craft. The idea that meaning could be a physical thing shaped my thinking – and informed my subsequent training as a typographer.

This connection to making has stayed with me, even though our day-to-day work has, following our transformation from printing press to integrated service provider and global consultancy, been increasingly about the digital rather than the physical. These days, we service our clients on a variety of levels. Their brands are our tools, their activities our domain, their attitudes and public image what informs our gaze. But even in the way we approach the most abstract things, we still bring together thinking and doing, head and hand. What’s more, we also still celebrate the entirely analogue – via the Hieronymus brand, which is deeply and intrinsically committed to craft traditions and not least to the tactile attractions of paper stationery.

The journey our firm and I myself have undergone has never felt like a sea change to me, though there have, of course, been changes along the way. As a company, we’ve had tough times and fun times, and I’ve always had the good fortune of being surrounded by bright minds and intelligent hands. Today, those minds and hands are busy shaping the future.

Likewise, House of Manus is not a break with the past or a change of direction, but a reflection of something that has always been a core part of who we are, and is now finally manifesting itself. House of Manus is an investment in a world that’s very close to my heart – in cultural practices that are, in my view, not just worth preserving but highly relevant for today and tomorrow. It’s also an investment in the Hotz Group’s own future, and a reaffirmation of our heritage. Thinking and creating – leveraging the combined intelligence of head, hand and heart – have always been key to that heritage.

Porträt Fabian Hotz

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