When the end of the year arrives, we tend to get a little sentimental and start looking back at it – with all its highs and lows. 2022 hasn’t been an easy year for many. At Kaufland e-commerce, we faced a couple of challenge as well, but had also many highlights. We will talk about those in this article.
2022 fast forwarded
January: 2022 began for us as it probably did for many other companies as well … with Omicron. We still had to follow the 3-G-rule, avoid unnecessary visits to the office or physical meetings, etc. Nevertheless, we started this new, exciting year with a lot of energy.
February: Since two out of 3 of our offices are located in North-Rhine-Westphalia where carnival plays a huge role, we celebrated Weiberfastnacht (women’s carnival or the start of the carnival week) in February – remotely of course. During a Teams call, our colleagues were able to toast, network and vote for the best costume. There were games (charades or city-country-river), some treated themselves to a Berliner and naturally, a lot of carnival tunes were playing in the background.
March: On March 10, we were able to officially announce Kaufland e-commerce as our new employer brand. Several teams worked together for months to achieve this – more about that later.
April: One year of Kaufland.de – on April 15 we could celebrate its first birthday. Crazy, right? Since the rebranding, we achieved even more growth: Currently 9.000 sellers are offering 45 million items on our online-marketplace. Well, that’s definitely a reason to party!
June: While all of the restrictions of the pandemic were dropped in June, we could als celebrate a big milestone for us. On June 1st, one of our fulfillment centers was able to receive the first items for our delivery option “Fulfillment by Kaufland”. 100 employees have worked together to reach this goal.
FBK (Fulfillment by Kaufland) has been the toughest nut to crack for me as a Product Manager, but also, the most satisfactory one. The level of complexity that we faced during the project was extremely challenging, but it also forced us to learn 10 times faster than before. – Fernando, Product Manager
July: Since April, we worked together with a group of students of the CIIS of Cologne University on a chatbot prototype as part of the annual Capstone Project. In July, they could finally reveal the results – at university as well as to interested KECse.
August: It’s party time! On August 12 our summer party took place – many of our new colleagues could finally meet in real life. We partied, laughed and ate some great food together at Dock² in Cologne. Read more about the summer party here.
September: At the Run & Fun Santander company run on September 12 in Mönchengladbach, our team of 11 participants not only mastered the 5-kilometer track, but also scored some gold medals: Business Analyst Declan was awarded as fastest out of 2.000 participants. Together with Simon, Teamlead Financial Controlling, and Lukas, Infrastructure Engineer, they also won first place as the men’s team.
Our online marketing was also successful in September: Sponsored Product Ads went live in the Kaufland app. More about that in the next chapter.
Another highlight in September? Technical Program Manager Felix and our Tech Recruiters Kristina and Vivian were part of the Pitch Club in Berlin.
October: Drama baby, drama! In October, some of the KECse were volunteers in a photoshoot at the Cologne office as well as at the fulfillment center in Bönen. You’ll see the results on our website soon – stay tuned!
We also had the great pleasure of announcing the return of our E-Commerce Day in 2023. You will be able to read more about that on this blog soon!
November: At the Digitale Leute Summit in Cologne, our HR colleague Christel spoke about the culture and work at Kaufland e-commerce. Additionally, Software Engineer Jakob and Software Architect Nikodem talked about “How to Scale Your Frontend.” At the Absolventenkongress, which also took place in Cologne, our HR colleagues had many interesting conversations and represented Kaufland e-commerce as an employer brand.
A team success: Sponsored Product Ads in the Kaufland App
Teamwork is dream work: The Retail Media and Web Analytics teams worked closely together with the Tech App team – in September, we could offer Sponsored Product Ads in the Kaufland app as well. As a result, advertisers can now also increase the visibility of their products with the performance-based advertising tool in the app, which makes the service even more attractive for participating sellers.
We are Kaufland e-commerce: Introducing our new employer brand
With the change to Kaufland.de, we naturally needed a new name as an employer brand as well. While 2021 was all about renaming our online marketplace, we worked on the change to Kaufland e-commerce this year.
We prepared for this special day many weeks in advance. Initially, we located the spots where real.digital needed to be replaced by Kaufland e-commerce and initiated the measures to do so. Adapting the new branding to our career page was a major project. But also many other topics such as our company profiles, job postings, e-mail signatures, office spaces, and much more needed to be addressed, so that the change on the day itself could be carried out quickly. – Lorena, HR
On March 10, kaufland-ecommerce.com finally went live. We were able to announce the new name and logo of us as an employer brand, our job fair booths and branding were adapted, and our social media presence changed as well.
We are kununu Top Company 2022 and welcomed 292 new KECse
It suddenly showed up in our mailbox: The news that we were named one of the kununu Top Companies 2022. This means that we have received mostly good reviews on the platform – from both (ex) employees and applicants. Benefits such as mobile work, agility and a free choice of hardware did their part here as well as an exciting place to work, flat hierarchies and, of course, the greatest colleagues in the world.
Not only the already existing team helped Kaufland e-commerce to grow. But also 292 new employees were a big part of it, as well. We thank each and every one of you for your trust into our company and hope you had a great start at Kaufland e-commerce in 2022!
In 2022, we once again saw how important a strong team is – especially with the number of challenges we had to face. – Gerald, CEO
We are going international – an outlook for 2023
We had the pleasure of announcing it in March: we will also be offering our online marketplace for Slovakia and the Czech Republic in 2023. It’s not surprising that our 2022 was all about preparing for this big step.
Our team has accomplished insanely much in the past 12 months. However, most of the work has happened in the background as we prepared for our internationalization next year. We’re looking forward with excitement to 2023, when we’ll go live with our Kaufland Marketplace abroad for the very first time. – Claudia, COO
From Business Development to Legal to Tech, numerous teams are involved in the internationalization of the online marketplace. The newly formed team of translators, part of the online editorial team, is also working diligently to ensure that the new Kaufland.cz and Kaufland.sk sites can go live – there are now 7 translators working on this.
The internationalization is an exciting time for the entire Translations team: it involves many organizational issues, but the process of finding solutions and new approaches helped us gain helpful insights and to grow from those challenges. Working with language is and remains our most important common ground: with the reader in mind, we focus on reaching people not only in Germany, but also in other countries, and guarantee them a fully successful user experience. – Sybille
As you can probably guess by now: 2023 will definitely be a thrilling year full of new challenges and exciting events. We can’t wait! With this closing statement from CTO Fabi, we are now bringing this review, and along with it our year 2022, to an end:
I wish all colleagues a Merry Christmas and a couple of peaceful days with their families before we finally get to experience together next year what we have worked so hard on in the past year! – Fabi, CTO