Hi, I'm Willem van der Horst. Welcome to my old school Blogger site. I started this back in 2007, moved things over to Wordpress for a few years, and in the age of TikTok and ChatGPT in 2025, I just moved things back here again.
Professionally, I'm a brand strategist. To find out more you can visit my business website: www.playfulbrandstrategy.com.
Other than that, I'm interested in and tend to write about a wide range of stuff. As a test, I'm separating my personal and business stuff. Over on playfulbrandstrategy.com there will be posts and newsletters about marketing, brand strategy, and experiments to adapt elements from play into that mix. Here there should be whatever else doesn't fit there.
I was born in New York, grew up in Paris, traveled around, lived in London, Singapore, Chicago, and moved back to Paris in 2019.
I enjoy and geek out about tabletop roleplaying games and board games, game design, skiing, books (a lot of fantasy, science-fiction, and non-fiction, essays), personal knowledge management tools, theme parks and roller coasters, traveling, cooking, food and drinks.
I used to be quite active on social media, and now not so much, but I'm still around:
PS: Je suis bilingue en français, et mon site professionnel a une version française, mais mes années à l'étranger font que j'ai une préférence pour lire et écrire en anglais. On peut boire un café et discuter en français avec plaisir par contre.
