Kinky Beats website

Kinky Beats is a fetish event series from Cologne that now takes place across Germany — with collaborations such as TheCraving and Wings of Chains, and formats like the “New Cologne After-Work”, which has had cult status for years and is now going on tour. Behind the series is Sue, a fixture of the scene and well connected far beyond Cologne.

The site is entirely mine: concept, design, build and the image selection. The visual language was the real design work. It has to carry an atmosphere without becoming crude, and it has to reach two audiences at once — people who have been in the scene for years, and newcomers going to a party like this for the first time. The series states that very ambition itself: a contemporary party in a fitting setting, where newcomers also feel at home.

The site is not a finished project, it is running. Every month I enter the new dates — on the website and, in parallel, on several event portals. That is legwork nobody sees, and precisely for that reason it matters: a date missing from one portal does not happen.

Then there is the newsletter. Sue writes the copy in her own voice, and I turn it into the mailing: setting blocks, pulling images, linking dates, scheduling the send. Because it repeats every month, I have since built myself a fixed routine for it. And because the series also includes books and merchandise, the site links straight through to the Etsy shop.