Florian Kaps

CLAIRE         
I always start every conversation with the same question: what are you curious about right now?

FLORIAN KAPS           
That’s already a very difficult question for a start. But I think curiosity is one of the main drivers of my life, so I try to be curious about everything. Today, in these very strange times we are living in, I think that even increases the curiosity, because things are somehow out of balance in many aspects. I think that’s a good starting point for being curious and rethinking the status quo. And of course, from a short-term perspective, I’m curious about your next questions.

CLAIRE            
I know it’s a big question, but I’m always interested in what comes to mind first for whoever I’m asking, because it could be something very huge or something relatively small for different people. You’re a man who is interested in all things analog and somewhat drawn to them, potentially by nature. Do you remember the first time you became fascinated with analog things?

FLORIAN KAPS           
No. I think we should start with the question: what is analog? Analog is everything that is real, basically, everything in our lives. Most likely, I started to be curious about why there is suddenly light after nine months in darkness. That’s how I imagine it.

This is also the reason I studied biology for many years: to find the questions for the principal answers. What triggers curiosity? What is the chemical basis for being curious? How does the world function, and how does nature function? I wanted to get a better understanding of the principles of life before even starting to think about analog photography or anything else. What drives us? What is the reason? What are we doing here? Studying biology was a decision that I’m still very happy about, because it allowed me to take a deep dive into the absolute basics of everything.

CLAIRE            
Was studying biology something you always wanted to do, or how did that come about?

FLORIAN KAPS
I was really driven by curiosity, and everybody was super bored by me asking 5,000 questions a second. Biology was the subject where I thought that, compared with law and many other things, this is really where we should start. Do we even have to bother about laws or architecture before we understand why the grass is green or why our five senses work? The senses and perception have always been among my main fields of interest.

CLAIRE
When you finished your studies, what did you do next?

FLORIAN KAPS
It took a very long time to finish my studies because I could hardly stop doing them. I spent almost ten years just finding out what spiders see. Don’t ask my father, I studied for a very long time. Then it turned out that, as the world’s leading spider-eye-muscle expert, it’s not very easy to get a job, surprisingly.

CLAIRE
Who would have thought?

FLORIAN KAPS
I had to leave the safe space of neurophysiology and spider eyes. Funny enough, I ended up at a very analog company called Lomo, or Lomography, which had a very big following based around shooting 35-millimetre film with a small Russian camera. I ended up working for them, and that’s where I first came into contact with analog photography and, later on, Polaroid.

CLAIRE
What did you do at Lomography?

FLORIAN KAPS
They hired me because they said, “You’re a spider-eye-muscle expert, and we just had to buy, I think, 2,000 Russian night-vision devices to keep our contract with the Lomo factory alive.” They hired me to get people excited about and sell these night-vision devices. Somehow, in their minds, there was a connection between spider eyes and night-vision devices. I don’t know exactly, but it was a crazy time. It was the boom of the internet, and everybody who was able to write their name was hired as an internet project manager. That’s how it started.

Then I started to fall in love with the potential of digital media, and I built websites and online shops.

CLAIRE
How did the whole story with Polaroid happen? I read somewhere that you found yourself at the closing party of the factory.

FLORIAN KAPS
It started before that. Lomography was an analog-based company, working with 35-millimetre film, and they were scared about the digital revolution. They asked me to do research and think about what the future of analog photography could be in an increasingly digital world. That was when I actively discovered Polaroid and said, “Wow, maybe that’s a cool combination of something very analog, but at the same time you don’t need a darkroom or a development laboratory to see your film.”

I started to really fall in love with the medium, and I proposed it to the management of Lomography. I said, “I think that’s the next big thing,” and they said, “What? No, definitely not.” They didn’t like my powerful presentation too much. I really thought there was something going on, especially because Polaroid itself didn’t seem to be interested in its own medium anymore; it was also investing a lot in new kinds of digital media. So I left Lomography, started my own business, and began focusing on Polaroid.

Originally, I wanted to offer some cool projects to Polaroid itself, but it wasn’t interested either. One of my ideas was to build a globally operating Polaroid online shop, because at that time it was becoming harder and harder to get Polaroid film through retailers, and online shops didn’t really exist. I wanted to build a communication platform and online shop that explained Polaroid film, because many young people were getting their hands on a Polaroid camera and didn’t know which kind of film they needed.

That’s what I pitched to Polaroid, and they didn’t want to do it. But they said, “If you really believe in it, you can do it on your own. You just have to purchase €180,000 worth of film, and then you can have the global rights for online distribution,” whatever that meant. I asked all my friends and family, we signed the contract, and we started to build the first and best Polaroid online shop and communication platform.

It worked surprisingly well. That was exactly the time when another successful company, Google, started to have this search engine. More and more people who couldn’t get Polaroid film from their retailers put it into the search engine and found us, because we were the only ones. We started in 2004, and by 2008 we had around 40,000 customers all over the world buying Polaroid film. It was a really cool business. Then Polaroid announced that it was going to close the last Polaroid factory, so we said, “No problem. We’ll buy the factory.” Very easy.

CLAIRE
It’s also very impressive that you were able to reach that many people with an online shop when buying online wasn’t even that common.

FLORIAN KAPS
It was a crazy combination. There were millions of these Polaroid cameras out there, and suddenly, because of Google search, you could take care of everybody who was searching for film and couldn’t get it through traditional retailers. They found you. It was a very strange situation.

That was the start of all of it. We had to buy the factory, which was totally stupid. Of course, we didn’t know anything about the complexity of producing the film. But at the closing event you mentioned, I met the old guys who had built it, and they said, “If you give us one year, maybe we can bring it back.” I said, “Perfect. No matter what it looks like, I can sell it,” which was a little bit of a mistake to tell them, because the first films they produced were, let’s say, complicated.

That was the start of something called the Impossible Project. We couldn’t call it Polaroid because we didn’t buy the brand name, and Polaroid continued to say, “It’s impossible to do it.” So I said, “Let’s call it Impossible.” It started as a joke, but we ended up calling the company Impossible, and we just started doing it.

That’s another important topic about being curious. I really think that if you have a vision, decide to do something, are stubborn, and never give up, you can realise a lot of impossible things. That’s pretty surprising.

CLAIRE
You said that buying the factory, or starting all of this,was a stupid idea.

FLORIAN KAPS
Totally stupid. On the one hand, it wasn’t a stupid idea because we had 40,000 customers, and this was the last chance to produce the product we needed. On the other hand, Polaroid film is the most complex chemical invention ever invented. It’s really breathtaking, and all the components it needed were no longer available. We basically had to start from scratch.

We relied on these 65-year-old technicians. It was fun, but it went against all logistics. I didn’t even go to banks or ask investors for money. It was 2008, when everybody was sure this was going to die. Why even bother?

CLAIRE
How much money did you have to raise to buy it?

FLORIAN KAPS
The funny thing is that it was, again, €180,000. The Polaroid management would never have sold me the factory. I tried to negotiate for one year, but they weren’t interested because they had decided to close it. They had no interest in the stupid guy from Austria keeping it alive and maybe even succeeding. It didn’t make any sense.

The reason we could buy it was that the FBI suddenly invaded Polaroid’s headquarters in the US. Basically, the whole top management was put in prison because of tax fraud. It was a big crime. One junior manager in the US, whom I liked and who liked me, we had shared a lot of red wine on many occasions, called me and said, “Hey, Doc, believe it or not, for one week I have the right to sign. I have the Prokura; I have the right to sign. If you can transfer €180,000, because that’s the factory’s scrap value in the books, we can close the deal.”

Again, I had to call everybody and say, “We have one week. We need €180,000 for a huge factory.” It was really huge. Then we made it. We transferred the money and bought the factory within that one-week window.

CLAIRE
So luck was also part of it. Things fell into place, but you still—

FLORIAN KAPS
I don’t believe in luck.

CLAIRE
What do you think it was?

FLORIAN KAPS
I don’t know. I always say there is an analog god who says, “I think Polaroid film should stay, maybe we need it.” Many times, when there is basically a dead end, something suddenly happens because we always put many, many seeds into the ground. If I hadn’t drunk all those bottles of wine with this guy, he was basically nobody, but I liked him and he liked me, then maybe it was luck. Or the analog god, or faith. We don’t know exactly.

CLAIRE
But you still decided. You still went for it.

FLORIAN KAPS
I didn’t even think about it. It was a no-brainer. We had the customers, and for one year we had said that we had to find a way to buy it. Then there was the possibility to buy it. Okay, let’s buy it.

CLAIRE
What happened afterwards? You said there were people who had worked for the factory whom you convinced to stay.

FLORIAN KAPS
They had already been fired, and then I persuaded them to continue working. We started with ten people with an average age of 68 or something like that. It was pretty special. They didn’t have this real start-up feeling. Their idea was, “Okay, we’ll do it, but we don’t work more than four hours a day, and we want a full salary and a pension plan.” I said, “What pension plan? You’re already retired. We’re a start-up. Let’s make the film.” It was an adventure. It was pretty funny.

Then they started doing it, and somehow, after one year, we really held a press conference in New York and presented our first film. All of that was only possible because Polaroid went bankrupt shortly afterwards. We could purchase the last remaining stock of all the Polaroid film for basically nothing, and we could sell it to finance the restart of the factory.

My wife is still angry with me because, if I hadn’t decided to invest everything in this stupid factory, we would have had a very nice income from selling the Polaroid film and then moving on. The factory, as we know, is still alive and I think it produces close to ten million packs of film. The management is even thinking about building a new kind of factory because demand is greater than those ten million. That’s pretty crazy.

CLAIRE
You basically built it up again.

FLORIAN KAPS
We saved it. That was the first step, because otherwise all these super-complex machines would have been scrapped. If they had been scrapped, they would have been gone. We saved it and started to restart it, let’s put it that way. We built a new brand and took many steps, but many more steps had to follow.

At a certain point, we also brought in a really serious investor because we had to buy another factory that produced the negative. This changed the whole character of the company. At a certain point, the investor suggested that it might be better if I stayed at home, to put it in nice words. Very nice of him.

I still have shares, I think 0.01 or 0.001 percent. I don’t know exactly, because I kept my shares when I left, but since then they’ve invested close to €400 million, or something like that, into the project. So I was diluted.

CLAIRE
What’s the process behind doing something like this and committing to something when everyone is advising you against it, saving a Polaroid factory or film factory?

FLORIAN KAPS
In fact, that’s the best sign you can ever get for a project. If I have an idea for a project and the bank understands it, and my wife doesn’t say it’s completely stupid, that’s very important. If the bank understands it, immediately stop the project. It means it’s just average.

I’m just making fun, but it’s important to believe in projects that, at first sight, don’t meet everybody’s expectations. It’s the same with a leather notebook. How stupid is it, in a world where everything is on Facebook or digital calendars, to start a business that is about good-smelling Italian leather notebooks? It doesn’t make any sense, so that’s a good sign to start, especially if you think long-term.

That’s also why I connected with Jérôme (CEO of paper republic) right at the beginning, when we opened Supersense. We believed that the next generation, who grew up digitally, could develop a demand and an understanding for all these analog, handcrafted, high-quality tools. I have to say, we were right.

CLAIRE
You were. It’s incredible what has been built. You mentioned Supersense, which was also something pretty unique in Vienna that you created. Could you explain a bit about what Supersense was?

FLORIAN KAPS
For the Impossible Project and Polaroid, we opened spaces all over the world, in Tokyo, New York, and Paris. I loved being in these places and simply looking at the people who came in, seeing what they were doing, what they were wearing, and what they were interested in.

It soon turned out that the people buying Polaroid film were becoming younger and younger. They were always interested in nice coffee, paper, vinyl, and handicraft. I said, “Wow, there’s something going on, and it’s not all about Polaroid. It’s about the whole concept of rediscovering the power of their own hands and creative tools, based on a digital understanding.”

I searched for a space that connected all of that and basically had a department for every sense. I thought the big difference between purchasing digitally or online and going into a real shop is that you can really tickle all the senses. Online, you can look at something and hear it, but you can never smell it, lick it, or touch it. So let’s create an environment where we try to produce everything in front of people’s eyes. We want to tickle all the senses and combine a restaurant with a shop and production.

That was the crazy concept, and my investor, who loved me regardless, said, “What? Let’s concentrate on the film.” He didn’t want to do it. Then he told me to stay home. Vienna is my home, so I thought, “Perfect. I’ll stay home, and then I can do this project.”

Since I was a child, I had been in love with this crazy building on Praterstraße. It’s a Venetian palace in Vienna. That alone is so stupid that, of course, I had to love it. So I thought, “Let’s create a restaurant.” We put all of the little golden handshake, which wasn’t really golden, but maybe silver or bronze, into the idea of opening Supersense, bringing other crazy people together, and celebrating analog. Jérôme was one of them. We wanted to make it the most analog space, workshop, and laboratory in the world. That was the rough idea.

We also wanted to do research. Again, as a biologist, we had many ideas about what could work and which direction it could go in. Producing music records on site was always one of the main subjects of our interest and curiosity, and that’s still what is going on there right now. I think that’s the most interesting development we’ve made and are still making, because nobody else is taking care of it.

Vinyl records are booming, but they’re still produced with technologies from the 1940s. It’s really unbelievable. The way they’re produced is highly industrial and environmentally disastrous. It’s like the production of toast bread or whatever. It’s really shitty.

So we said, “Let’s produce records in a completely different way.” We took a deep dive and first developed Mastercut, which is basically a very traditional way of producing the world’s highest-quality records by reducing everything to the first step: cutting lacquer discs from Japan with old machines. Then we started to rebuild new machines.

Now, after many other impossible projects, we have a completely new machine developed together with our friends from Teenage Engineering, a Swedish group of crazy engineers. We’ve developed a very sexy machine that enables you to cut high-quality records on recycled ocean PET material in basically every beautiful room in the world.

CLAIRE
Did you know how any of that worked, or did you have to learn and figure it out along the way?

FLORIAN KAPS
I still don’t know exactly. I try to learn, but the trick is always to connect with people who are experts and who have spent a lot of time really understanding it. Surprisingly, there are many young people who have spent many years understanding analog technologies, and then you combine them with some old engineers.

My role is always to trigger their curiosity and force them to rethink things, and to merge the best of analog and digital for this post-digital generation of young customers. That is my main expertise and my main interest: understanding what people would love to do in ten, 20, or 30 years.

CLAIRE
How do you figure that out? How do you go about it?

FLORIAN KAPS
I don’t figure it out; it just happened to me. That was the biggest surprise. In 2008, when we bought the factory, my own kids got a Polaroid camera for Christmas. They really hated me because everybody else got the iPhone and they got this shitty camera. But already, I think, three or four years later, this camera was far cooler and more interesting than the iPhone.

We had to organise all these Polaroid parties, and suddenly I had their interest. Nobody in the industry really took care of this incredible opportunity. They are still thinking that you can get the next generation, Gen Z or whatever they call it, excited about an app or a bigger screen. But I think that’s totally over. It’s exactly the other way around.

That was always my main driver, because rather than keeping dinosaurs alive for elderly white men or women like myself, suddenly the next generation became super interested in them and started to merge them with digital. That was the main driver to continue doing it and take it to the next level.

CLAIRE
It sounds to me as though you’re very talented at bringing people together and, maybe not convincing them, but making them want to be part of something that you say is impossible, in a sense.

FLORIAN KAPS
That’s definitely the key to building these networks. One of the big advantages of the Polaroid project is that it’s not just about knowing people. People respect me because I am one of their kind when it comes to doing things, and they trust that I do it because I’m driven by a mission. I fail and stand up again. That is what money cannot buy.

For example, to work with Teenage Engineering, you can either send them a cheque for ten million and they might consider it, or you can get their attention by doing a project they believe in, building trust, and doing things they’re interested in. In that respect, I’ve had the opportunity to connect with really incredible people from all over the world.

I think that’s important. It’s something an agency cannot invent, and it can only be done over many years, if not decades, of doing stupid stuff.

CLAIRE
Would you say there was a key person whom, if you hadn’t crossed paths with them, you wouldn’t be where you are now?

FLORIAN KAPS
Many. Most importantly, my wife, of course. Maybe one day she’s going to kill me and also end the project, but she definitely helped start it, while also combining it with other projects such as having children. She is definitely number one.

There are also people I haven’t met personally but have read about, such as the founder of Polaroid, Edwin Land. If you read about him and listen to what he said, this visionary, it’s really inspiring. Then, all along the way, there are these inventors and young people.

There are always people like Jérôme, who started as a super-boring consultant for super-boring companies and then started a super-boring leather-book brand. They’re not super boring.

Then there is fighting, failing, doing, and suddenly even questioning ourselves. That brings us back to my wife: people who really criticise you and question you on a high level are the most important people over the years, because they force you to learn, change, and react.

CLAIRE
Were there people you met where everything completely fell into place and you thought, “No, no, no. I can’t work with anyone who gives the green light to any of my ideas”?

FLORIAN KAPS
One of the biggest lessons in my life is: never work with people you wouldn’t like to have a beer with. Many times, there’s a decision where you think, “This guy is difficult, but it totally makes sense because of this and this reason.” It never works out. It’s always a disaster.

Really trust your senses. If you don’t want to spend time with somebody, don’t do it. It’s about the chemical reaction and the overall philosophical direction you share. For example, it never works with people who do things for commercial reasons. That doesn’t mean it’s not important to think about the commercial aspects, but it’s always about the customers and the product. If you do it right, then commercial success will follow, and not the other way around.

CLAIRE
What’s your drive behind all this? You’ve listed many projects you’ve worked on: you opened Supersense, you saved the Polaroid factory, and you’re also working with vinyl now. Why do you do it?

FLORIAN KAPS
Because I believe in the importance of showing the world that there are alternatives. Especially for the next generation, I see such an opportunity. What can we do against all the shit happening at the moment? We can provide education and give people an understanding that there is an alternative way, and that there is value in a lot of things the industry tries to make you forget.

In this world, imagine there were no shops where you could eat a beautiful hamburger for €16, with juicy meat, where you bite into it and everything runs down. If you don’t have that, it’s very hard to understand what McDonald’s is doing. If only McDonald’s exists, you think, “Okay, that’s what a hamburger is,” but it’s not. It’s an industrial version of something that could be amazing. It also started out amazing. There is this famous film about McDonald’s: they were super passionate and wanted to have the best burgers, but then industry made it something different.

That’s important to understand about whatever we have, whether it’s bread, a notebook, or anything else. Yes, there is an industrial version developed so it can be produced in high quantities, as cheaply as possible, ideally by people who don’t earn any money. Or you can go the other way, and then it’s something totally different.

Industry and corporate values have so brainwashed society. I don’t even complain about it. I say, “This is the perfect opportunity to celebrate all the things we can do by connecting these people and crafting beautiful objects.” It’s not about replacing the industrial version, but providing an alternative. It’s also about helping people understand that a profitable business can be a very small business and doesn’t have to be a unicorn somewhere.

My main driver is that I’ve seen the openness and curiosity of the young generation who grew up digitally towards all these values, the craft, and the wonders of the world. I would have big problems accepting that they are disappearing, and this is the chance to spark that fire.

Two weeks ago, I was riding on the train, and there was a young girl who looked a little like a punk, with lots of piercings. Suddenly, she took out a little needle and started knitting for six hours on the train. I said, “What’s going on here?” Instead of a phone or whatever, she was knitting. I thought, “Okay, that’s good. I think that’s good, somehow.”

CLAIRE
Do you have a long list of things you’re worried about disappearing?

FLORIAN KAPS
Yes, unfortunately, it’s a pretty long list. Every minute, so much is still destroyed and thrown away. All the people who still have this knowledge are 60 or 70, and many of them believe that nobody is interested in what they’re doing anymore. The clock is ticking.

At the same time, we have already accomplished an incredible amount. Books didn’t die. Newspapers didn’t die. Records didn’t die. I think even the cassette is coming back. A lot has happened. Even leather notebooks are having a huge comeback, and we’re gaining more and more importance and understanding out there. Look at what has happened with coffee roasters or bread. There are a lot of super-positive signs, but yes, it’s still a long list.

CLAIRE
What would be the next thing for you to focus on?

FLORIAN KAPS
The next thing is definitely the record. We now have the technology in our hands, but there is still a lot of education to do. For example, because our records are all cut in real time and involve a lot of handicraft, beautiful papers, and recycled materials, they’re going to be three or four times more expensive than a classic record. We have to explain why this is an important aspect, and not a disadvantage but an advantage.

That is one of the biggest problems: people want organic, fair trade, and so on, but they’re often not ready to pay for it. That understanding is important in order for it to work. Otherwise, it doesn’t work. If you eat a Wiener schnitzel for nine euros, you’d better not eat it, because there have been a lot of compromises along the way to sell you a Wiener schnitzel for nine euros.

CLAIRE
There’s always an educational aspect to it. You have to give people insight into things they might not even have thought about.

FLORIAN KAPS
It’s the same with wine. I’m a big fan of the natural wine movement as a philosophy. If you see a bottle of wine for five euros at Hofer, don’t buy it. It’s bad for your body and bad for the environment. It would not even qualify as drinking water because of the stuff in there. Industry blindfolds you because you’re used to looking for a good bargain, but we don’t even think about how many steps are involved.

That’s why transparency is also very important. As you do here, produce everything in front of people’s eyes and use good-quality materials, because you’ll feel the difference. Then explain to them that it has an impact on the price if you organically tan the leather or choose a nice paper. But then you will have it your whole life, 30 or 40 years, and it’s a good investment, not just in the product, but in the world and in yourself.

CLAIRE
I think it’s super interesting. Many people say that 2026 is the year of analog. At least, it has been said on social media.

FLORIAN KAPS
I think 2026 is maybe the beginning of the thousand-year era of analog. It’s the end of digital, let’s put it like that. I love that.

It should not be the end of digital. That’s wrong. Digital has many incredible advantages. For example, I think this podcast will most likely be streamed digitally, so it’s not a bad thing.

But regarding products and leaving traces behind, digital takes away all real things, and that’s a problem. You see it with pictures: they all disappear somewhere in the cloud, compared with photo books back in the day. With records, you still have them. You don’t have to search for a playlist. It’s important to start leaving traces again for the next generation.

It’s a very good year. Even with all these special kinds of people who are in the press every day, basically doing shit, I think it’s a big chance for us as Europeans, or anybody who believes in real values, to say, “Let’s do something. Let’s create spaces.”

That’s another important topic at the very top of my to-do list. I think we need these spaces to bring people together and make them feel the difference, rather than doing everything online. I’m very happy you (paper republic) opened this beautiful store here, because it adds a totally new level of understanding what paper republic is all about.

CLAIRE
That was obviously the intention: to bring people together in a physical sense as well.

FLORIAN KAPS
Jérôme is just very good at copying everything we did. Just joking.

CLAIRE
He is Inspired. This is also part of the curious: we have different touchpoints and try to provide different ways to connect with anything done by the curious. It could be an audio format, a video format, or a written piece. But we also have physical events and workshops, because we think it’s important to have different ways of connecting, being inspired, and experiencing the curious or anything else.

Thank you so much, Florian, for joining the curious. It has been a really inspirational conversation. Thank you so much for joining us.

FLORIAN KAPS
Thanks for the invitation. Maybe let’s meet again in ten years or something like that, to celebrate the first decade of the analog age.