About Us
A platform for the people making things in this city
Cluj-Napoca produces far more creative work than it exports. BestCluj exists to close that gap — one creative, one properly presented body of work, one introduction at a time.
Where this came from
BestCluj began as a service learning project for the Faculty of Political, Administrative and Communication Sciences at Babeș-Bolyai University, under the name “Artisans of Tomorrow: From Cluj to the Globe”.
It launched on 24 May 2024, in the fourth-floor hall of the FSPAC 1 building on Traian Moșoiu street, with more than twenty professionals from creative fields in the room. The evening was built around one question: how a maker in this city reaches an audience outside it. The course that came out of it taught the practical part — prompt structure, drafting at volume, video, scheduling — and every participant left with the tools to keep doing it alone.
The city around that room explains why it was needed. Over roughly fifteen years Cluj-Napoca turned itself into a technology hub, drew people back from abroad, and built a festival culture that gets written about internationally. The creative sector grew in the same period, 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.
The observation the project started from has not changed since: the work is not the problem. The distance between the work and the people who would pay for it is the problem.
What we actually do
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.
What we 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.
Cluj as the subject, not the backdrop
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.
Listed outside this site: BestCluj on Crunchbase .