Het Poetsbureau

For years, brand building in the domestic cleaning category was barely necessary. Demand far outstripped supply, and the main barrier to growth wasn’t finding customers, but finding enough cleaners.

In 2025, that changed. Service vouchers became more expensive, the tax benefit disappeared, and consumers started scrutinising how much domestic help they hired. A category that had long grown on autopilot suddenly had to prove its worth again. For Het Poetsbureau, that meant a fundamental shift: alongside recruiting domestic helpers, actively generating demand became just as important.

Today, 73% of the market has no domestic help. That’s a sizeable pool. Convincing that group required more than telling them Het Poetsbureau cleans well. The whole sector already communicates that way: functionally and rationally. The real question became: why is domestic help relevant in people’s lives today?

Particularly among people in their thirties, a striking paradox emerges: they have more free time than previous generations yet feel a constant time pressure. Not necessarily because they have too little time, but because so much has to fit into it. A career, children, health, exercise, friends, travel, social commitments — and ideally a moment to themselves. All within the same 168 hours of free time each month.

The result is a constant feeling of being pressed for time, what sociologists call a time squeeze.

Even in our free time, we want everything we do to produce something tangible. Cooking puts a delicious meal on the table. Exercise gives you energy. Time with your children builds a close bond. Seeing friends creates fond memories. But cleaning? What’s clean today is dirty again tomorrow. The frustration is not just in the hours domestic work demands. It’s above all a task that never really feels finished. A never-ending story.

That led us to rethink domestic help entirely. The value doesn’t just lie in the work someone takes off your plate, but above all in what you can do with the time you get back. Domestic helpers don’t give you extra hours in a day. But they do give you more life in the hours you already have. Your hours.

That insight gave rise to More life in your day. Not a conventional tagline explaining what Het Poetsbureau does, but a brand promise that makes clear why it matters.

With it comes a shift in how the category is perceived. A domestic helper becomes less of a practical cost to keep your house tidy and more of a deliberate investment in quality of life. You outsource something to make room for things that actually add something to your life.

That makes it bigger than a campaign claim. It’s a strategic brand platform that can shape advertising, activations, content, employer branding and future communication. And crucially: it gives Het Poetsbureau an emotional position in a category that has historically communicated in purely functional terms.

To launch this new brand promise, we didn’t just want to explain the value of domestic help, we wanted to make it tangible. Someone who hires a domestic helper for four hours a week gets back 208 hours over the course of a year. But what does such an abstract number mean? At Wijnegem Shopping Centre, we built a five-metre-high tower of books that visualised how much you could read in that recovered time. Suddenly, 208 hours became an impressive amount of life.

The book tower launched the image campaign and flipped the conventional question. Not: how much does a domestic helper cost? But: what is the time you get back worth to you?

Building on that idea, we developed three hero films about moments that open up again when someone takes the domestic work off your hands. A man quietly swimming laps in a lake. A couple seeking the stillness of a sauna. A family losing themselves entirely in building a sandcastle.

Not spectacular bucket list moments, but recognisable forms of time for yourself. Because more life doesn’t have to mean doing more. It can just as easily mean finally having the time to do something without rushing.

The domestic helper is never visible. Not because the role becomes less important, but because we want to show the result of the work: the life it makes possible.

The same feeling comes through cinematically. Long, unhurried images, natural soundscapes and a minimal voice-over slow the pace. The new sonic identity follows the same philosophy: not a classic commercial jingle, but a subtle musical signature that creates recognisability without disrupting the moment.

More life in your day comes to life across multiple channels. The films form the emotional heart of the campaign on television and in cinemas, where image, silence and soundscape land with even greater force.

On radio and social media, the campaign takes on a different rhythm. Short films, recognisable situations and inspiring content show how people fill their recovered time. Not as perfect Instagram moments, but as small pockets of happiness that anyone can relate to. The platform becomes a continuous invitation to reflect on the question: what would you do with the time you get back?

Out of home deliberately breaks with the category’s visual codes too: no cleaning products, rubber-gloved heroes or gleaming interiors. Online video, display and digital touchpoints extend the same world further.

With the new brand platform, we’re not addressing a changing market with a one-off promotional message, but with a claim that Het Poetsbureau can build on for years to come. Every subsequent campaign, activation or piece of content strengthens the same idea — compounding what came before.

This is exactly what Cartel Agency, as a creative business accelerator, stands for: compound creativity. Not starting from scratch each time, but developing creative ideas that reinforce one another and whose impact accumulates over the long term.

For Het Poetsbureau, More life in your day represents a fundamental shift. From telling people how well they clean to making clear why domestic help matters. From a functional service to an emotional benefit. And from a tidier house to a richer life.

Because the real value of a domestic helper doesn’t lie in what disappears from your day, but in what takes its place: time — perhaps the most valuable thing of all.