A platform for the people making things in this city

Cluj-Napoca is one of the fastest-changing cities in Central Europe. Over roughly fifteen years it turned itself into a technology hub, drew people back from abroad, and built a nightlife and festival culture that gets written about internationally.

The creative sector grew in that same period, and mostly in the gaps. Illustrators, photographers, ceramicists, musicians, filmmakers, designers — working at a standard that would hold up anywhere, and known almost entirely to each other.

BestCluj started from a single observation: the work is not the problem. The distance between the work and the people who would pay for it is the problem.

We take on creatives one at a time and build them a presence that a stranger can read — in English and in Romanian, with the work documented properly and described without inflation.

We run workshops on the parts of a creative career that nobody teaches: pricing, contracts, licensing, presenting to a client who is not in the room.

We help with production, because good work presented badly reads as mediocre work.

And we talk to the businesses, institutions and city bodies that could be commissioning here and currently are not.

We are not an agency and we do not take a cut of your work. We are not a competition, a prize, or a ranking. There is no leaderboard and nobody is voted off.

We are also not going to pretend to be larger than we are. This platform is being built in the open, and the honest state of it at any moment is what you see on it.

The illustrations across this site are of this city — the cathedral in Piața Avram Iancu, the Telephone Palace, the roofline you get walking down from Cetățuie. That is deliberate. This is not a template with a city name dropped into it.

Cluj-Napoca is the subject. The people who make things here are the point.