20 years of kunstform (2008 - 2011): the first real store in the Heilbronner Straße

At the end of 2007 Flo had said he would do it, and with that kunstform had rooms of its own for the first time: room 0.44 at Heilbronner Straße 7, the old railway directorate by the main station, the H7 startup centre back then. How that came about is in the previous story. It was not much yet: a small room as the warehouse, plus an office. It did not stay that way for long: more stock came in, and more and more riders moved to Stuttgart.

One of them was John Krämer, Johnny to everyone. Like Fuhre and Raiko he comes from Eberswalde, and civilian service had brought him to Stuttgart. We rode together, hung out together, and after the session it usually went on to the shop, because there was always something to do. Over time the "lending a quick hand" turned into a fixed job on the parcels, and without Johnny a good deal would have been left undone in those years.

On top of that he is definitely one of the best BMX flatland riders in Germany. His edit from July 2010 shows how he rode back then. Watch the last combo.

The same building held a small shopping mall, home among others to the legendary Thirdrail graffiti shop run by Patrick, the Haarfiliale hair salon of Filly and s-t-g-t by Mario Ringhofer. We all had our small stores there, and the vibe was great. When a unit at the front came free, it was obvious to turn it into a store. We built it in a single night: Johnny, Ente, Flo and Moritz worked through, painted the whole room and laid the floor. On 17 November 2008 kunstform opened with opening hours for the first time.

With the store Johnny got his place too: he started his apprenticeship as a retail salesman with us and ran the store from then on, advice, sales, stock, repairs.

What the store brought in during the first years was not enough to live on. So Fuhre lived in the stockroom for almost three years, up on the shelf, with the parts below. For showers there was a contract at the gym around the corner. From 2008 he was in full time and kept building the online shop; his studies have been paused ever since. Seppl started at an online marketing agency in those same years, campaigns and analytics, and sat at the computer for kunstform at night after work.

We still rode, and we did it in the building: in the H7 we had a secret spot, a floor you could ride on, and where we also threw the odd party, with a DJ and hundreds of people. And when it was smaller, the table football stood in the stockroom. A short clip from 2009 shows what that looked like.

And because the one man show had turned into a small real company with employees, there was a first Christmas party at the end of 2009. Somewhere in those years the mailorder department got an office of its own.

Until then kunstform had been a pure flatland shop. In March 2009 street and park were added, with a new online shop and two new team riders, Chris Metzger and Tobi Schumacher from Sindelfingen, "the spearhead of our street armada" in the news of the day. A little later Sebastian Balk of the BMX Bande crew joined the team, and from 2010 Basti also worked in the shop and wrote the product texts.

This is what the online shop that was being built at night looked like, here in 2011: the wings left and right with the lettering BMX MAILORDER, the new arrivals in the middle.

Every summer there was Cologne and the BMX Masters, with a booth that held essentially half the store. What a weekend like that looks like at the end is best seen in the photo of the pack-up: everything back into the rented lorry, and the site looking the way sites look.

One of the most important neighbours in the H7 was Boost e.V. The skate club sat a few doors down and ran the Boost skate hall in Bad Cannstatt, a pure skateboard hall at the time. We wanted in. So in 2010 we asked the Stuttgart BMX scene how big the need for a hall really was, and took the result to the club's general meeting on 8 December. The skaters went along with it: a four-week trial to begin with, one BMX afternoon a week.

The first one was on 16 December 2010, from 5 to 8 pm for BMX only. So many came that even we had not expected it, and from February 2011 the BMX day was fixed, every Thursday. What grew out of that has shaped the scene in Stuttgart: the Thursday at the Boost hall became the BMX Thursday that exists at the Stuttpark today, and out of those sessions many more events, jams, contests and workshops have grown over the years. The trailer by Marian Hofmann shows what the hall looked like back then.

With the store we started doing events in our own rooms, and the stairwell of the railway directorate was made for it. In May 2010 the video premiere of Animal "Cut" ran there, the audience sat on the steps, and in October the one of OSS "Football" followed. In October 2011 we had an open day at the Unternehmertage in the H7, Fuhre and Johnny rode a small show, and for the locals there was a bunny hop contest. Among them was a certain Wendelin Mok, whom we will get to later. And on 20 November 2011 we celebrated three years of the store, with a cake shaped like a three.

Back to the H7. In December 2010, the same week as the first BMX day at the Boost hall, we granted ourselves one more wish: a bigger office, and in the office a floor of OSB boards you could ride on. We laid them ourselves. Working and riding flatland in the same room, with sessions after work and visitors who just dropped by. What that looked like is well documented: an accounting software company shot a commercial there, and out of the footage came a little office session with Flo and Fuhre.

We did not have it for long. The H7 had been an interim use from the start, and that we would have to move out at some point because of the Stuttgart 21 construction site was clear. That it would happen within a week or two was not.

The lease was terminated, and between Christmas and New Year 2011 we had to be out, with all the stock and without a new location. There were talks going on in the entrance hall that day and we had to carry our things straight through them. People complained. We had no choice, we had to be out that day.

Around 80 companies sat in the H7, plus clubs like the Rocker 33, and all of them had to leave at once, because the partial demolition and the tunnelling for Stuttgart 21 were coming up. It was in the papers at the time. The listed old building still stands today, right next to the main station, empty since the move-out. Seppl gave the office a farewell video:

Where we ended up is in the next story: Kriegsbergstraße, the second store and the first shop window of our own. What those years felt like is something Seppl, Flo, Johnny and the others tell themselves in our documentary for the 20th anniversary.

All the best & Ride on
Your kunstform BMX Shop Team