Active on many platforms
Rea Eggli combines decades of professional experience in the fields of communication and culture with the right network, visual aesthetics, and organizational skills. Together with her partner, Chris Eggli, she runs the agency eggli.eggli in Zurich. At the same time, she runs a crowdfunding platform, www.wemakeit.ch, with two other partners.
For more than ten years now, Rea Eggli has been running a communications agency in parallel to her involvement in various areas of culture. This was once known throughout Switzerland as Swissandfamous. Today, Rea and Chris Eggli no longer want to hide behind the provocative fantasy label. "The name amused us when we founded it in 2000. Today we have a certain age and therefore experience. Now we also want our own names to stand for what we offer on the market." That's why eggli.eggli has been around since September 2010. Through this agency, Rea and Chris Eggli serve clients from business, creative industries and culture in the areas of communication, design and project management.
Rea Eggli has developed her skills over the course of a very colorful professional life with ever-changing twists and turns. At the age of 15, she already spent a year in Texas getting a taste of international air in the import and export department of her father's twin brother's company. "In the U.S., as a teenager from the Bernese Oberland, I learned how you also have to assert yourself in a completely foreign environment in order to stand on your own two feet."
Before her lateral entry into the world of media, she later gained her basic knowledge at hotel business school and then worked briefly in the hospitality industry. It was during these young years that Rea and Chris met; this twenty-plus year relationship resulted in a now 4-year-old boy.
The former art director at Contexta in Berne was already very involved in other cultural circles in addition to his job in advertising. "It was through this relationship that I discovered the world of art and culture," says Rea Eggli, looking back on the course she set. Enamored of this, she treated herself to a summer course on literature and cultural history at the Sorbonne in Paris. Back in Bern, she looked for a temporary job and ended up in India.
At Swiss Telecom at the time, there was a vacancy in the international team working for an Indian joint venture, among other things. When this became concrete, Rea Eggli was given the opportunity to accompany the CEO of this foreign venture to New Delhi as an assistant for two years. She didn't think twice and signed the expatriate contract.
Experience in India
"It was a very exciting and instructive time. I had to organize meetings for the Board of Directors and look after a wide variety of VIPs. "Around this India adventure of Swiss Telecom, the trained gastro specialist was also able to further professionalize her talent as an organizer at numerous marketing events. Rea Eggli eventually took on more and more tasks in the field of marketing and communication. "Learning by doing." She has also learned to keep her nerves even in very turbulent phases. "India is not all that easy. With a Swiss mentality and company behind us, we often had to exercise patience. That still helps me today. It takes a lot for me to get stressed or lose my nerve." During this time, Chris Eggli initially remained with Contexta in Bern, but later resigned and followed Rea to India. During this sabbatical, he dealt exclusively with art and organized various exhibitions in Asia. Back in Bern, Rea Eggli continued to work for the International Department of Swiss Telecom in 1997 - now in PR and Communications.
At the leading national telecommunications provider, the Internet had meanwhile become the upcoming topic. Eggli was sent to Stuttgart and then to Vienna for four months each, where she worked on an intranet concept but also got her first taste of the press. Because the live communications sector "interested her more and more," Rea Eggli wanted to get to know the industry from the other side. She got herself a job with the MCI Group. In 2000, Rea Eggli was able to build up the event department and implement marketing events for the newly opened Zurich branch of this worldwide network with over 700 employees.
In all these jobs, there were always various points of contact with art. Rea Eggli realized that, as an organizer in this sector, she could bring some of her experience to bear for the benefit of artists. In 2001, she therefore quit her job and signed up for the first cultural management course at Sawi. "This continuing education was still in its infancy at the time, but since I was starting my own business at the same time, I was able to benefit greatly from it."
Cultural Management
As a "case" for her diploma thesis, she founded and built up the agency Swissandfamous with her Chris parallel to school. "That was still a pretty spontaneous project. We didn't have a real business plan. But quite a lot of ideas." The first implementations were readings and planning literary tours. "That was at a time when no one was talking about readings." Swissandfamous soon organized tours for Reeto von Gunten or Benjamin von Stuckrad Barre, produced theater plays with Beat Schlatter and Patrick Frey, set up, together with Danielle Stutz, the first photography fair "Showcase International ", which soon found international imitators and conceived the "Märli am See", which still exists today, after eleven years, as a series of events.
Today, Swissandfamous "only" continues as a small publishing house. This recently published an album of ten audio books with works by Christian Kracht. The exclusive productions, which were produced in Switzerland, Holland and Germany, were read by three musicians: Dieter Meier, Schorsch Kamerun and Dirk von Lowtzow.
With the communication office eggli.eggli, Rea and Chris wanted to focus the activity a bit and say goodbye to cabaret. "It was time for something new." The customer base includes the NZZ Folio with regular customer mailings, the Viadukt with the Viadukt Night, the Swiss National Museum with the design of communication materials for exhibitions, or sometimes an advertising agency for which eggli.eggli takes on a below-the-line production. eggli.eggli is also responsible for the media work of the "Stadtbad" hamam, which opened a year ago in Zurich's Volkshaus, or of Arctic Paper Switzerland. Chris Eggli is responsible for design and art direction. Rea is responsible for management and consulting. Together they are partners in the book and furniture store "Westflügel" in the Viadukt in Zurich, where the entire INCH-Furniture collection is sold alongside antiquarian photo and art books.
Crowdfunding
Rea Eggli has founded the crowdfunding platform www.wemakeit.ch as her free space to compensate. The first platform of this kind in Switzerland was created on the initiative of the artist Johannes Gees. As a third partner in addition to Rea Eggli, is the designer and artist Jürg Lehni . One year ago, on February 5, 2012, Wemakeit went online. In the meantime, Switzerland's first crowdfunding platform is heading for the 2-million mark this year. New cultural funds that make creative projects possible.
The largest amount so far has been over 34,000 francs for a publication about the discontinuation of the Zurich club Abart. The former operators put the project online to test whether there was any interest at all in such a book. The interest was confirmed. Does the public want this exhibition, this film or this music album? "Besides funding, clarifying a need is a very important aspect of crowdfunding," says Rea Eggli. In this context, pre-funding can also be interpreted as pre-selling and thus market testing. "In addition, you can wonderfully integrate your audience, your fans or buyers and thus achieve customer loyalty. Instead of buying a ticket at the theater box office or downloading an album, such micro-producers pre-finance the final result. They are involved during the entire project phase and, as the saying goes: anticipation is the best joy, they feverishly support the final product as ambassadors. There is no better PR than that!"
In return, in addition to the emotional values, there are, for example, invitations to a meal with the artists, limited artworks, exclusive previews, private garden concerts, naming in the credits or sometimes a say in the project. Crowdfunding also functions as a trend barometer. "I can see in advance what's going to hit the market in a year. You are informed before something happens," Rea Eggli knows. You can discover these upcoming projects by surfing the platform without obligation. There are currently around 50 ideas posted on Wemakeit. The projects come from the fields of culture, design, architecture or community. The Wemakeit editorial team checks in advance "whether the work is professional and the budget is in a healthy relationship. Rea Eggli does not see any danger that the increasingly rapid growth of the platform could dilute the funding into a "watering can principle" that is no longer very effective. "An international analysis shows that the opposite is the case." At the American pioneer Kickstarter, several thousand projects are online at the same time and this platform generated over 400 million dollars last year. "So in Switzerland, we are only at the beginning of crowdfunding."
Andreas Panzeri
