Press, press, stress.....

Lately we have been so busy in here. Our little office is getting very crowded, more colleagues have joined us, there are many jobs to do and since GreenGraffiti® exists for a while now, we are getting more attention and press.

Being so busy it happens that we don’t look at all the mail we are getting in the office, selecting the most important ones. We found out that that isn’t the smartest thing to do.

We have had a lot of press so far and are mentioned in magazines, newspapers ore blogs, which makes us so happy. We are proud to say that this week we where even mentioned in two magazines: Accenture and Creatie.

We where selected to be in the top 10 of green concepts, which is very special and so nice for us to know.

The two magazines where send to us this week, and luckily this time we opened them. We just have so many things to do, that we can’t keep up with the press!

We don’t want to miss anything and would like to save al the documents written about GreenGraffiti® (to nicely save and someday show to our grandchildren).

So if you would like to help us collect these documents and keep track on the articles written about us, we are very grateful!

Thank you from all the working bees at the GreenGraffiti® team.

Clean Drinks

Clean Drinks is a network community for people working in the field of sustainability. By bringing al these people together the aim is to make it easier to create a better world together.

We where invited to promote and come to this event and present our business together with other green companies in the Netherlands as, Stoere Vrouwen, Remotion and the 1% club.

The night started of in the beautiful industrial club Trouw on the eastside of Amsterdam. The event started of with a very interesting discussion, which brought the municipals and sustainable entrepreneurs together. We entered the discussion very actively and a little nervous, finally having a change to talk to the municipals face to face.

So what is our relationship like with the municipals? Well, to tell you the truth, we operate in a ‘grey area’ and rules about our form of advertising do currently not exist. This can leave us in weird situations: Some municipals really like what we are doing and are supporting us and our business, others are not so sure how to react on innovation. The discussion was very interesting and we found out that there are many entrepreneurs in sustainability like ourselves, struggling with legislation. So we entrepreneurs are al hoping that the open discussion will be fruitful!

After the discussion, which was heated not only because of the topic, but also because of the high temperature in the club, we refreshed ourselves with some cold drinks and mingled in the crowd.






The afternoon before the event started, we went out and made GreenGraffiti’s showing the way to the event and we created a ‘green carped’ that gave the event some extra flair! We where very glad to find out that many people supported and liked our GreenGraffiti’s and we received a lot of compliments on our work for Clean Drinks.

We enjoyed inspiring speeches of Marijke Vos and the Urgenda foundation and stayed a little to long for a Monday night. When we finally left the event, we felt a little tipsy from the delicious organic wine, but we enjoyed the night and will be present at the next Clean Drinks event.

Oh yes we did.

The latest campaign of our partner overseas is definitely worth to mention as they worked together with Dominos during the widely known Super Bowl!

For us Dutchies the Super Bowl is not a big deal. Frankly I only new about it because I saw an Ace Ventura film once when I was younger in which the mascot of a team, I believe it was a Dolphin, was stolen.

In America however, the Super Bowl is a huge deal and is one of the biggest sports events, being the final of the National Football League. It has the highest viewing figures and a lot of artists perform during half time, varying from Diana Ross to Britney Spears, to this years band The Who.

One legendary show, in which Janet Jackson gave the public a nipple flash, even caused a huge national fuss and changed the event from being live broadcasted to be showed on telly with a little delay!

February the seventh was the day of the 2010 Super Bowl XLIV in the Dolphin Stadium, Miami.
This year the game was not accompanied with a celebrity showing of her private parts, but nevertheless with something spectacular that has the same potential to cause national fuss: GreenGraffiti®.

Around the whole stadium GreenGraffiti® Canada executed a huge campaign for Dominos announcing the company change of Dominos Pizza.


Dominos pizza has had her share of bad publicity with costumers who compared their pizza crust with cardboard and their sauce with ketchup gone bad. Instead of ignoring the negative complains they decided to change their whole way of making a pizza. A process what they call: The pizza turnaround.

With the GreenGraffiti’s the public was made aware of this process and their new pizza by getting the website pizzaturnaround.com in the spotlights and tell their story. Curious what’s on the website? Have a look and see, and maybe find out what the new pizza tastes like!

O by the way, the New Orleans Saints won the game.

The Valentine Peace Project

Love. When you think about love, a lot of things can cross your mind: What do you know about love, have you experienced true love yourself or what does love mean in our life’s today?

In a society that becomes more and more individualistic, where narcissism becomes more common than philanthropy, what can we know about true love?

The legend of Valentines Day tells us that in ancient times, soldiers weren’t aloud to marry their ladies because there full attention was needed when they had to fight for their mighty kings and emperors.

One day a young couple visited bishop Valentine, with the urgent request to marry them anyway, since their love was to powerful to dismiss. Valentine, blown away by this big love bubble, was convinced by the young couple that love was more important than anything else, and decided to marry the lovebirds.

Unfortunately faith turned sour for Valentine. When the emperor, who had a hart of stone and didn’t understand the importance of love, heard about the secret marriage he convicted the poor man till death on February 14th. Before the trail was convicted, Valentine, a romantic till the end, secretly gave the beautiful daughter of the guard a little note that said: From your Valentine...

We are reminded of his romantic spirit once a year, on Valentines Day.

We can be romantic as well and buy millions of carts perfectly premade for us so that we don’t have to think about the right words to express our feelings of love. We can go to websites to order gifts pre-selected, which perfectly match your beloved ones profiles. And there is a huge offer of movies about love, or the misery of not having someone to love, that we can see.

However all these possibilities nowadays seem kind of superficial compared to Valentine, who gave his life in the name of love, and it makes you wonder: Are there still people like Valentine left? Who truly care about love, and love only?

Luckily there are. It looks like some lucky people inherited the romantic spirit of our forefather.

One of them goes by the name of Federico Hewson, founder of The Valentine Peace Project.
Trough his project, he invites people from all over the world to celebrate all faces of love and love’s greatest potential: Peace. On Inner-, Community and Global level.

Federico believes in the statement of poet Pablo Neruda, who said that poetry is an act of peace. Poetry explores the hidden knowledge and spiritual dimensions of life - "a little world built to convey something of the larger" (from The Poetic Imagination). It's an opportunity to listen to that small voice inside. In times of a suffering planet and a breakdown of old systems we can still hear the voices in our head to take notice of our deeper selves.

There isn’t a better way to celebrate peace and love, and connecting all three levels of peace, then sharing thousands of poems and flowers to passers to stimulate dialogue and reflection.

Even if you’re no Shakespeare, you can contribute by sending in your poem or go to the website and see if there are other ways in which you can be a part of the project.

We where very lucky that we could be a part of this project, announcing it in a peaceful way, by using GreenGraffiti®. So keep your eyes open when you are walking the streets, while quietly thinking about the right sentences for your love poem….

So here is to Love and Peace, hope you have a wonderful Valentines Day!

The wonderful winning works

Last December, when the winter was just getting started, we executed a project for the Toneelmakerij to promote the theatre play Kees de jongen. Just to refresh your memories Kees de jongen is a theatre play based on a famous Dutch book for children about a poor boy, Kees, who had a very vivid fantasy and sees the world in a very playful way.

In addition, besides promoting the play, we worked together with a primary school in the centre of Amsterdam. This is a perfect example of a community project to give something back to the society, using GreenGraffiti® in a different way.

The school was close to the Westerkerk and to the Theo Thijssen, museum, who is the writher of the book.They had organized a competition and the children designed templates expressing their own interpretations of the dream world of the little boy Kees. The top ten designs where made into actual GreenGraffiti® templates and where sprayed around the school, the Westerkerk and the museum.

Because of the weather and the oncoming snowfall the project got cancelled a couple of times, so when the time was finally there that we could execute the project together with the school children, they almost could not believe that the time was finally there.

Over excited, some a little bit timid waiting to see what we where going to do with al the weird tools and equipments, we started the project on a rainy thursday morning, but fortunately no snowfall.

The project started on the schoolyard where al the children gathered around us and where curious to see what was going to happen. The ten winners where lucky because there price included helping us spraying the GreenGraffiti’s.




They needed a little help spraying their designs since the high water pressure sprayer was almost as large as some of the children. However, with a little bit of assistance, the GreenGraffiti’s turned out beautifully.







We left the schoolyard with their teacher and the ten children to spray some more GreenGraffiti’s next to the Westerkerk and the little museum. So when you visit Amsterdam in the next couple of weeks, make sure that you don’t skip this part of the city to have a look at their designs.

The project lasted the whole morning, leaving the winners and us covered with water and dirt but proud of their winning works!

Art and Advertising

Some state that art is closely linked to advertising. This relationship can work both ways, one inspiring the other, or the other way around.

While it’s fairly new to be green in advertising, street artist have been eco-minded for a longer period of time. Reverse graffiti has been around for more than eighty years and has developed from writing simple statements on cars like “wash me” to creating beautiful and tremendous pieces of art. Resources have expanded from water to even using sand or moss to create a shape or message.

Take Moose for example, no not the animal, but the pseudonym of Paul Curtis the street artist. He was one of the first that discovered the power of cleaning. His tools are simple, using a shoe brush and water. He calls himself “the professor of dirt”, creating beautiful pieces of art. He got inspired when he worked as a dishwasher, spotting some dirt on the wall, and creating an even bigger spot by cleaning it. In the end he cleaned the whole wall, because of the big contrast between dirty and clean spots.

Doug Pray made an interesting documentary of one of his biggest works, cleaning a tunnel in San Francisco, drawing pictures of indigenous Californian plants, which had grown there if the tunnel didn’t exist. Please feel free to become a fan and watch the documentary on our GreenGraffiti® Facebook. The contrast between the dirt and clean spots is highly visible.

Street artist Edina Tokodi is a fairly new ‘graffiti’ artist, putting a new spin on green tactics and takes it to another level. This lady studied graphic art and design at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts and also completed urban design course work in Milan, Italy.

The work of Tokodi can be touched and felt and with here artwork she hopes to recreate the relationship between nature and the city people. By seeing and feeling her art they hopefully get in touch with nature again.

She creates different shapes and forms, mostly animals or plans vivid in her memory from when she was living in Central Europe. The green colour of the moss is in great contrast with the surrounding area’s sheathed in steel, glass, pavement, and stone...

Tokodi strongly believes that the reactions of passers (or the lack of any reaction at all) is a real indicator of a deeper malaise that we need to pay attention to and reseed with “mentally healthy garden states” and direct interactive engagement.

So there is moss and water to use. But when I thought I’ve saw it al, I found this video, surfing the Internet, of twenty-four year old Kseniya Simonova, drawing a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table portraying how ordinary people where affected in The Great Patriotic War in Ukraine.

Everyone has seen sand castles before, but this is a unique practice that amazed a lot of people so far. This video speaks for itself so there’s no need to elaborate anymore on this.

Perhaps, when we have had a lot of practice, these techniques may come in handy one day for GreenGraffiti®. It’s always good to be inspired, keep track on what is going on in the art world and have big dreams, but for now, lets focus on refining our water practices before we dare compete with these artists!

GreenGraffiti looks back on the year 2009

Dear GreenGraffiti® followers,

After a short Christmas break, to reload our batteries, we are back on track starting the New Year by looking back on the past and making an evaluation of our year.

Luckily we can look back on 2009 as a highly productive year. GreenGraffiti® has grown tremendously from a small start up, to doing over sixty campaigns in year one. We have executed campaigns throughout the Netherlands, in over more than thirty cities.
We have had a vast variety of clients, from large companies to smaller initiatives. From commercial clients like Heineken or Starbucks for promotional goals, to city councils promoting social community based projects. We selected some of our own personal favourites, which we considered would give you a good representation of our year.

The National Postcode Lottery provided us with our biggest campaign so far, doing 1750 advertisements in 24 cities! By using GreenGraffiti® we promoted the use of the LED-lamp, which is an energy efficient replacement of the light bulb. The campaign generated a lot of attention and hopefully created awareness amongst the Dutch citizens that it is better for the environment to use a LED-lamp.



‘Better ride your bike’ was a campaign executed for the environment service of Brabant to encourage people to ride the bike instead of taking the car to work. GreenGraffiti's in the shape of bikes where placed next to cars and parking meters to trigger the decision to ride the bike. We liked this campaign a lot because they are in line with our vision of sustainability and giving something back to society.



Our campaign for the Amsterdam Police had a social goal as well. We gave back to the community, by doing an anti car break-in campaign. Together with the police we made people aware of not leaving valuables in their car in order to prevent petty crimes.


















To show you that GreenGraffiti® can be used in multiple ways, we would like to share with you our collaboration with designer Marcel Wanders. We created an art-like Christmas pattern to decorate the streets for Christmas.



Besides doing promotion for our clients we had PR going on for ourselves. We had our first appearance on Dutch television, in the show ‘Bij ons in de BV’ where we won a pitch by presenting our business idea. After this television appearance we became widely known.
We also featured in different magazines like Margriet, Libelle and Esta, who wrote some inspiring articles about green entrepreneurship, giving back and sustainability.

By looking back, we can happily conclude that 2009 was quite an eventful year for us. We grew, we learnt, we used our concept in multiple ways, and gave back to society.

So hear is a toast to 2010, that it may be an exiting and sustainable year for everyone!