The Estonia brand has launched a new series of photographs and short videos that highlights Estonian entrepreneurs, athletes, musicians, and scientists whose work has helped grow Estonia’s visibility and credibility around the world.
The people featured in the photos and videos include entrepreneurs Markus Villig, Ahti Heinla, and Mihhail Zigadlo, athlete Kelly Sildaru, scientist Lili Milani, musicians Katariina Kivi and Ann-Lisett Rebane from the duo Duo Ruut, entrepreneur and e-Residency programme founder Taavi Kotka, and sculptor Edith Karlson.
The creative concept for the photo series was developed by the creative agency AD Angels. The photographs were taken by Krõõt Tarkmeel and the videos were filmed by Kristjan Taal.
“We wanted to create a striking visual series of portraits featuring outstanding Estonians – one that presents our business and creative environment through their success stories and inspires people to collaborate with Estonia,” explains Stina Vürmer, Project Manager of the Estonia brand. This is the largest photo project in the history of the Estonia brand so far, and the material created is freely available for anyone to use in promoting Estonia at toolbox.estonia.ee.
Ahti Heinla
Edith Karlson
Kelly Sildaru
Mihhail Zigadlo
Markus Villig
Katariina Kivi and Ann-Lisett Rebane (Duo Ruut)
The creative concept behind the success stories series is titled “Rooted in Estonia”. Its authors, Jan Teevet and Kärt Villmann from AD Angels, based it on the idea that strong roots make it possible to grow and take flight.
“Estonia is at once a runway for big ideas and a place to land. Each portrait places one remarkable Estonian person in the middle of a location somewhere in Estonia, whether natural or man-made. That is how the images were created – with the person and their surrounding environment forming a unified whole,” the authors explain. Estonia’s success story can never be contained within just one person, place, or moment. It is something that only comes into being when all of our small and big steps are brought together. It is a story of our shared courage and consistency – of how far we have come together and where we dream of going next.
Through the backgrounds of the photographs, the series also introduces Estonia’s varied nature and urban space. The choice of shooting locations was inspired by each person’s personal story and field of work, while also seeking unexpected contrasts. “Of course, there were also some happy coincidences along the way, and during scouting we sometimes found even better locations than we had hoped for,” the authors say.
Today, the Estonia brand toolbox contains thousands of high-quality photographs of Estonia, but marketers and promoters of Estonia had a clear need for unique, portrait-style cover material that would help tell Estonia’s most powerful stories to the world. The photographs will first be used in business centres opened at Estonian embassies. The photo series was commissioned by the State Marketing Department of Enterprise Estonia in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and financed by the European Union Recovery Fund (NextGenerationEU).
“A big thank you to the whole team for capturing the spirit of our brand and Estonia’s success stories. We now have distinctive visual material that can be used by everyone introducing Estonia to the world,” Vürmer added.
Download the photos and videos from the Brand Estonia toolbox.
Longer introductions to the featured success stories can be found on estonia.ee.