The Legend of Belderbrandt

Six boys from Drunen

It didn't start in a boardroom, and it didn't start with a business plan. It started in a schoolyard in Drunen, Brabant, where six boys became friends at primary school. Playing marbles, kicking a football around and cycling home together. The ordinary things that laid the foundation for something that would grow far bigger than any of us could have imagined back then.

We've grown up together ever since. We've shared the good and the bad, and everything life has thrown at us along the way: diplomas, heartbreak, house moves, setbacks and successes. It's the kind of friendship you never have to think twice about. It's simply there. Always.

Eighteen kids and one group chat

The years went by and life changed. We moved away, studied and built our careers. But the friendship remained. In fact, it grew right along with us. Between us, we now have 18 children, and almost all of us have somehow found our way back to Brabant, as if the region has always had a way of pulling us home.

Every year, we go away for a weekend together, just the six of us. We always take on an escape room, and every time we're reminded of how well we work together. Everyone plays to their strengths, like a real team, and somehow we always manage to escape. And every time we do, we say the same thing: "Funny how five intelligent men always manage to escape." It's still unclear who's number six. We're also regularly found on the padel court, more for fun than for winning. All these moments together have been captured for years in one group chat, with a name that has become almost as familiar to us as our own: Legends of Belderbrandt.

How Belderbrandt got its name

The name was born on holiday, as the best stories often are. Somewhere along the way, over a couple of drinks, we jokingly told fellow holidaymakers on a beach in Biarritz that we came from Belderbrandt, a place that doesn't actually exist. It was a fictional region somewhere in the Netherlands, located between two rivers we had invented ourselves: the Belder and the Brandt. The people who lived there got their news from the equally fictional Belderbrandt Gazette.

It became a running joke. And at some point, one of us said, half joking and half serious: if any of us ever starts a company, it has to be called Belderbrandt. Everyone laughed. Nobody forgot.

From our Legend to my own path

The years passed, and we each followed our own path. Today, we work as an estate agent, mortgage adviser, accountant, car salesman, lawyer and staffing consultant. Six different fields, six different areas of expertise, but all built on the same foundation: the friendship that began in a schoolyard in Drunen.

My dream, built on that foundation

Now is the time to show that a joke made on holiday can grow into something real. Belderbrandt first existed only as a Legend, an inside joke shared between six friends. I carry that foundation with me in everything I do. It's what I build on.

Belderbrandt is now part of my own path. I'm taking the name beyond our group of friends and building something with it that I truly believe in, with the same dedication and loyalty we've shown each other throughout all these years. I want Belderbrandt to keep growing, and I'm looking for people who want to be part of that journey and help turn our Legend into something much bigger.

Belderbrandt may not exist as a physical place somewhere between the Belder and the Brandt. But it exists as an idea, an aspiration and a compass. To me, it represents something I deeply believe in: if you work hard and keep your goal in sight, dreams really can come true!