A walk around Boxhagener Platz, the neighborhood Ucon Acrobatics calls home.
“Designed in Berlin” can sound like a broad statement. Berlin is a big city, with plenty of different ideas about what it means to belong here.
For Ucon Acrobatics, it gets quite specific: Gabriel-Max-Straße 16, a former cowshed built in 1906, and the streets around Boxhagener Platz.
Locals call the square Boxi. It sits in Friedrichshain, surrounded by apartment buildings, cafés, small shops, and the everyday movement of the neighborhood. This is where our office is. It is also a good place to understand the kind of life we design bags for.
So, step outside with us.
A place to make our own
When our founders, Jochen Smuda and Martin Fussenegger, moved Ucon Acrobatics to Berlin in 2008, they found an unusual place to build the next chapter of the brand: a former cowshed and hayloft.
It took considerable work to turn it into an office, showroom, photo studio, and garden. But something is fitting about that beginning. Taking an overlooked space, seeing its possibilities, and carefully making it useful feels close to the work of design itself.
That building became our working home. Behind the street address is a place where ideas can become sketches, samples, conversations, and eventually the bags you carry. For us, the connection to Berlin starts here, with a space we made our own and a neighborhood we became part of.
Everyday life, just outside
Walk toward Boxi and the scale changes. Inside the office, a bag can be a discussion about proportions, materials, or where a pocket should go. Outside, it becomes part of someone’s day.
That shift matters.
We design objects people carry while doing other things. Cycling to work. Picking up a few groceries. Meeting friends after a day that ran longer than expected. A bag needs to fit comfortably into those moments, leaving you free to get on with them.
Around Boxi, those different parts of life sit close together. Work, errands, a coffee, an evening out: the same few streets can connect them all.
It is a useful setting for a brand built around everyday functionality. The questions are practical: What do you need to take? How easily can you reach it? Will the bag still feel comfortable on the way home?
The friends who make it feel like home
A neighborhood becomes personal through the people and places in it. For us, a walk around Boxi is also a chance to introduce a few friends.
Start on Gabriel-Max-Straße, our own street. Silo brings together specialty coffee and brunch - for years our favorite weekend destination - while Neumanns has its café just along from our office at number 18. They give you two good reasons to pause before you have walked very far. Together with Silo, we even created our very own ‘Boxi Blend’, bringing a little taste of Boxi straight into your home. And Boxi has always been more than just a place to us. Jochen’s first child practically grew up there, as it became a second home for the Smuda family during those years. 🙂
Even closer is Sanabel, which shares our address at number 16. The wraps with falafel, halloumi, and makali literally keep us coming back - in fact, over the past 18 years, hardly a week has gone by without us stopping by there several times. And at number 11, Duo Sicilian Ice Cream brings a little Sicily to the neighborhood. Leave room for a scoop.
Around the corner on Grünberger Straße, KEIT focuses on sourdough bread. One of the best in the world. There is something we appreciate about that kind of focus: taking an everyday thing seriously and paying attention to how it is made. Thanos (founder of KEIT) has been a great supporter of our in-house events, most recently helping us bring our B Corp event to life with some amazing bread.
Nearby, Li.ke brings vegan Thai cooking to the square, offering another reason to turn a short walk into a meal - we especially recommend their Khao Soi Soup or Panang Curry (that they put on the menu on our request). Those who prefer meat can head one street over to Hangmee, which is also fantastic and run by the same charming Thai owner.
Then there are our store friends, HHV and Maerz. At HHV on Grünberger Straße, records, clothing, and sneakers bring music and personal style together. Maerz belongs on our neighborhood list, too. These shops are part of what makes browsing around Boxi feel personal: each brings its own point of view. Tom and Martin are truly two of the most wonderful people you could ever meet. We feel incredibly lucky to have worked together for so many years, and even luckier to call them our friends.
Together, these friends help explain what being based here means to us. Our office is surrounded by people putting care into very different things, from a loaf of bread to a selection of records. We make bags, but we share these few streets with many other kinds of work and creativity.
That is a part of Boxi we want you to meet. When you visit, leave time to step inside.
Two markets, two ways of looking
On Saturdays, Boxi becomes a place to buy food. Its weekly market has a history reaching back to 1905, and it still serves a very ordinary, necessary purpose: helping people fill their kitchens. On Sundays, the flea market brings books, records, clothing, furniture, and household objects around the square.
For anyone who works with objects, the change is fascinating. One day is about what you need now. The next is full of things that have already lived with someone else and might be ready for another home.
A secondhand object invites a closer look. What has held up? What still feels useful? Why does a particular shape remain appealing years after it was made?
Those questions matter to us, too. We want our bags to earn a place in everyday life through their usefulness and their design. Looking beyond the first impression is part of that ambition.
What Boxi means to us
Boxi gives Ucon Acrobatics a sense of place.
It connects the work inside our office to a world of people moving, carrying, stopping, and changing plans outside it. It puts design in the company of ordinary life, where comfort, access, and usefulness matter as much as appearance.
We are also one small part of a neighborhood that belongs to many people. Longtime residents, local businesses, families, and visitors all share these streets. Being based here means recognizing that the place has its own life beyond our brand.
When we say “Designed in Berlin,” this is the Berlin we can point to. The building where we work. The square nearby. The short walk that turns into a longer one.