11 Zalando
Campus

In summer 2008, I started looking for a job after completing my training as an administrative assistant in the public sector. I found an ad in the classifieds from some fashion company. It said they were looking for “not your typical secretary”. Now, I was no fashionista, but it piqued my interest. That’s how I met Robert and David – two founders with a vision – and I liked the concept of online retail. We hit it off from the start, even though I had a few reservations, of course: There wasn’t an office, not even a website.

My first day of work was September 1, 2008. The office? A basement apartment in a prewar building in Berlin that we shared with another start-up. We turned the cellar into a shoe warehouse. But soon the boxes were stacked all the way to our desks. I came from the public sector but immediately felt right at home. Finally, no more rigid processes and fuddy-duddiness! I love turning chaos into order. For a while, we packed every box ourselves. The “customer hotline” was a cell phone that everyone had to take turns answering. We were a strong team from the beginning, and we still are today.

Back then, I never would have thought that we would be as big as we are in 2016. The office on Sonnenburger Straße – known as the former Umspannwerk Humboldt, where we moved into in October 2010 – seemed unbelievably huge to us.

But when it came time for our next move, we had trouble even finding an office that was sufficiently large enough for all of us.

A great deal has changed since then. I’ve worked with many new colleagues over the years, and my responsibilities have evolved. Today, I’m an executive assistant in a more conventional sense. But our spirit remains the same. We regularly organize huge events and our holiday parties have always been a pretty clear indicator of how fast we’ve grown. In our first year in business, we went bowling – with around 70 people back in 2009. Today, we’re a big enough team to fill the Station-Berlin, an event venue near Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. Even more important than that is team spirit in our everyday work in the individual teams. We all pitch in to get the job done.

For me, Zalando means joy and passion, growth and speed. The speed can cause headaches now and then. But I like change. I like moving now and again. The Campus will finally reunite us all in a single location. Will it be the last time we move? Well, I don’t know about that. You should never be satisfied with the status quo. Otherwise you’re bound to get left behind.