Philosophy

A lot of people believe us to be crazy hobbyists rather than serious business people. Nevertheless we are by now responsible for over more than 400 employees that request us to act responsibly and on the basis of reasonable commercial assessment. We try to be both - crazy hobbyists and responsible business people. We even believe that these two opposites combined make for a perfect couple. We don’t want to have a company which devotes itself just to economic figures and only sees reason in generating large profit.

To us, entrepreneurship is the possibility to make ones dreams come true and live them like a daydream. And just like in a daydream, we have the chance to influence the course of the dream by our actions.

More than 20,000 fans are enthusiastic about the show.

Of course we also want to make money with the Miniatur Wunderland. But striving towards profit will not become first priority in our actions, other than it does in other businesses. To us people are more important than profit margins. People and our coworkers are not figures or numbers on our balance sheets but spectacular individuals with different qualities, skills and emotions. And exactly this philosophy can be recognized  in every square inch of Wunderland earth. For instance when building a new section, we define a rough outline and then leave it to our employees to creatively fill the space with their own ideas. This way the Wunderland is covered in far more than more than 1,200,000 hours of work that have gone into affectionate details, often not even recognizable to the human eye. Also it is important for us to actively work ourselves in all departments of the Wunderland and not just delegate from our desks.

Small version of Wunderland: Of course, in Miniature-Hamburg the Wunderland is a must-have as well. Inside the model building there's even a miniature model railway.

Any corporate consultant would possibly declare us crazy and tell us, that we could build an equally big site with the same number of trains and figurines in half the time with half the staff. But then the Wunderland, at least in our opinion, would no longer be a wonderland. The love and devotion to all detail would be forgotten and we no longer could honestly declare to our customers and coworkers, that the Wunderland is our dream come true into which we submerge ourselves anew every morning of every day.

We hope to maintain this dream for a long time to come and that we can prove to others that it is possible to be successful without rationalizing away, striving solely towards profit and without factorizing people.

Gerrit & Frederik Braun and Stephan Hertz