On the first floor of a nondescript 1,000 sq metre industrial unit in Berlin’s Steglitz district, four workers are cautiously placing pregnant queen ants into test tubes in order to dispatch them across Europe. This is Antstore, the world’s first specialist ant shop, a business with around two dozen employees, a glass-cutting workshop, plastic and plaster modelling studios and a full-time social media manager.

It is just one of the surprisingly large number of shops in Berlin that sell only one thing, be it crawly insects, salty sweets, sticky tape or miniature string instruments. With online retail sales changing the face of high streets in cities around the world, many wonder if this hyper-specialisation could be more than an accidental side effect of the German capital’s tumultuous history, and also a blueprint for the high street of the future.

Q&A When Europe gets it right Show Hide As a series of crises puts Europe under strain, some cities are fighting back with innovative solutions. From hyper-specialist shops beating the online threat in Berlin to the Bulgarian city reversing the country's brain drain, from the Italian city finding new ways to tackle addiction to gambling to the Swedish town that has found innovative ways to combat extremism, we look at what European cities are doing to live better in our increasingly urban world.

Martin Sebesta started Antstore in 2003, frustrated that his city’s pet shops lacked either the expertise or enthusiasm to tell him how to build his own ant farm. Having survived cancer in his 20s, he chucked in a promising career at Siemens and rented a small shop from which he worked part-time to build and sell his own ant terrariums, which he calls “formicariums”, from the insect’s Latin name.

We made this area attractive – now we could be punished for it Ilse Böge

‘With ants I can see how they start small and build something big’ … Martin Sebesta of Antstore

The majority of Antstore’s sales take place via the company’s website, but Sebesta reckons the shop itself is still key to its success. First-time customers can choose between anything from a €50 (£43) starter set containing the robust Lasius niger, or common garden ant, to a tripartite formicarium with the South American Atta cephalotes, a species of leafcutter ant, for a starting price of around €500.

“Of course, you could get a goldfish and watch it swim from left to right all day,” says Sebesta as a trail of leafcutter workers diligently carries the remains of a wilted orchid through a glass skywalk over his head. “But with ants I can see how they start small and build something big.”

He considered branching out into stick insects and terrariums for lizards, but soon realised teaching his staff the required expertise would stretch the company’s capacities. “These days, if you want to keep your head above the water as a medium-sized business, you can’t afford not to specialise.”

Paul Knopf and his buttons at his shop in Kreuzberg

‘I have more buttons than I can sell before I die’

According to Nils Busch-Petersen, CEO of the Berlin-Brandenburg trade association, the high number of hyper-specialists is the result of historical chance. “Our city is home to these special kinds of shops not because of the senate’s efforts, but in spite of them,” he argues.

Germany’s Mittelstand, roughly defined as businesses with between 50 and 500 employees, may be commonly hailed as the “hidden champions” of nation’s economic success, but in Berlin retail, medium-sized businesses have traditionally been less hidden than absent. Two-thirds of the city’s 9,000 Jewish-owned Mittelstand retail companies were lost in the wake of the Reichskristallnacht pogroms in 1938. In 1972, during the Cold War, East Germany nationalised even small businesses with more than 10 employees.

In such a skewed retail landscape, many small shops found they could compete by specialising in goods neglected by generalist department stores, especially since retail space was cheap and in plentiful supply behind the Iron Curtain.

‘It’s one thing to take a typewriter apart’ … Bernd Moser in his typewriter store in Kreuzberg

Bernd Moser’s shop on Kreuzberg’s Gneisenaustrasse 91 illustrates this tradition: aged 76, Moser, who proudly sports a white walrus moustache, has for over a quarter of a century only sold and repaired typewriters.

Although already deep into retirement, Moser unlocks the glass door to his sparse premises from 11am until 4pm during the working week – mainly because demand remains high. After a 60-year career as an office machine mechanic, Moser owns boxes full of spare parts by long-bankrupt manufacturers and still has reams of instruction manuals stored away in his head. “It’s one thing to take a typewriter apart,” he says. “But I also know how to put them back together again.”

‘They don’t call the violin a cello for kids, do they?’ … Harald Truetsch in his ukulele shop

A hundred metres around the corner, lies Paul Knopf, a shopping emporium spanning two shop fronts and several storage units. It is named after its owner, who is himself named after the only product he has sold over its counter for 32 years: buttons, millions of them, intricately filed by material, size and colour in drawers reaching up to the stuccoed ceiling. “I don’t know exactly how many buttons there are in this building in total,” says Knopf, “but I know there are more than I can sell before I die.”

A short walk east, at Gneisenaustrasse 52, Harald Truetsch has for almost 10 years sold only miniature string instruments: ukuleles made of wood or metal, “banjoleles” with plastic membranes, mandolins, South American cavaquinhos and tiny bass guitars. “Big music shops often treat the ukulele as a second-rate instrument, as if it were just a guitar for children,” says Truetsch, his long white hair flowing as he picks up his own uke from behind the counter. “They don’t call the violin a cello for kids, do they?”

Knopf, Moser and Truetsch have all survived the ongoing gentrification of their neighbourhoods in part because of lenient landlords. But they also run lean operations with low expenses – Knopf has three employees to help tackle his intricate filing system, while the other two are one-man shows. Germany’s strict laws around shop opening hours have allowed them to work solo without risking burnout: many hyper-specialists remain closed not just on Sundays but Mondays too.

‘One sausage gave birth to another’ … Silvia Wald in Aufschnitt Berlin, her textile meat shop in Friedrichshain

And the threat online retailers pose to their business model is limited: Truetsch’s shop may be called Leleland.eu, but typing the url into a browser draws a blank page. When he tried selling his wares via an online shop he found the postal work overwhelming (“With instruments, people want to try before they buy”). Over the holidays, leleland.eu fills up with customers who have travelled from as far away as Argentina or Israel, and unlike with an adult-sized guitar, they know they will be able to take their purchases back on the plane.

With the old guard of Berlin’s hyper-specialists proving surprisingly resilient, younger shop owners are taking a leaf out of their books. On Boxhagener Strasse in bustling Friedrichshain, the 38-year-old garment engineer Silvia Wald has set up shop in an old butcher’s store to sell the kind of wares older customers used to see behind the counter: legs of pork, chains of sausages, mortadella ham, bacon rashers – but all made of fabric, to be used as decorative cushions.

The shop was borne out of a marketing gag for her textile company, Aufschnitt (“cold cuts”). “One sausage gave birth to another,” says Wald, who ironically has been a vegetarian since her teens. She soon realised the shopfront was an excellent showroom to advertise the made-to-commission work taking place in the studio part of her 70 sq metre unit.

In the year of her business’s 10th anniversary, she is also realising that specialists can sometimes specialise too much. Recently, Wald was commissioned to make a giant cushion in the shape of a currywurst, Berlin’s famed street food snack. Her client, the German capital’s branch of Madame Tussauds, asked her if she knew a tailor who could make some fries to add as a side. “Of course I can make some fries, I told them. They literally thought I could only make cushions that look like meat.”

‘I have sticky tapes mere mortals would never dare to dream of’

Hyper-specialists usually make for popular neighbours because they add character to an area. Since Ilse Böge opened Kadó, Germany’s first specialist liquorice store, on Kreuzberg’s Gräfestrasse 20 years ago, she has seen the entire area blossom. Known as the Gräfekiez, the network of tree-lined cobbled streets has also attracted property investors from around the world, and some of the shop’s neighbours closed down when their landlord suddenly doubled the rent. “We made this area attractive, now we could be punished for it,” worries Böge.

Katrin Lompscher, Berlin’s Die Linke (The Left) party senator for housing, has proposed extending the “milieu protection” measures, which currently protect low-income residents in select parts of the city from being pushed out by aggressive rent increases, to also apply to local shops. But Böge, who first started importing salty Dutch sweets for her personal cravings while studying economics, is in two minds.

‘What does the state know about how retail will develop in the next 10 years?’ … Ilse Böge in her liquorice store

On the one hand, she says, milieu protection for shops would give small-business owners stability to plan their future. But the economist in her remains sceptical: “What does the state know about how retail will develop in the next 10 years? You would end up creating a parallel business system.”

Instead, Böge and her husband, Frank, are putting in place measures for a post-shopfront future. Kadó looks old-fashioned: the 500-plus varieties of liquorice are stored in glass jars, arranged from sweet English allsorts via salty Finnish salmiakki to bitter Italian pure liquirizia sticks, and cash-only payments go through a vintage till.

But the old-school look betrays a more modern business model. As much as 35% of the shop’s sales now take place online, and Kadó’s sticky confectionery is for sale in most of Berlin’s independent cinemas and even, wrapped in a designer box, in the luxury KaDeWe department store.

‘Specialists like us are the future’ … Tape art on the facade of Klebeland’s new building

It is not unimaginable that Berlin’s first liquorice specialist could take the same route as Mohamad Ghouneim’s Klebeland. Ghouneim, a 40-year-old Palestinian German who has called Berlin his home since he was two, ran the city’s leading sticky-tape specialist from a store on Kreuzberg’s Ritterstrasse until rent increases forced him out of the premises.

Instead of shutting up shop, Ghouneim relocated to humdrum Wittenau, a suburb of Berlin, and got some tape artists to decorate the facade of the new building. Footfall has naturally decreased, but 80% of his business comes from online sales and regular industrial clients, for whom Klebeband’s four employees cut and colour match tape of all varieties to order.

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“Imagine you are a stage technician and you need to tape a lamp that gets very hot to a pillar,” Ghouneim says. “If you go to [DIY store chain] Bauhaus, they wouldn’t know what to do. But I can tell you that you need a polyester film with a special type of silicon glue that can stand up to 300 degrees. I have sticky tapes in my store that mere mortals would never dare to dream of.

“People who try to sell you everything are struggling more and more,” he adds with determination. “Specialists like us are the future.”

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