Jens remembers his first day at Zalando as if it were yesterday. “A disaster,” he says with a laugh. After meeting at five in the morning, taking a seemingly never-ending bus ride, being immediately busy at the Brieselang fulfillment center, and having to spend the night with a snoring roommate, some might have immediately turned their backs and ran. But Jens stayed, in part because he’s a positive force, and in part because he noticed his ideas were being taken seriously. What’s more, he enjoyed the work – and was quickly offered a position as Team Lead in Pick, the department responsible for gathering the goods for our customers' orders.
“I came to realize we were building up a huge location in Mönchengladbach,” he says. “I knew it was my opportunity.”
As a result, Jens soon found himself putting together our first desks. He watched the sparks fly as our steel shelves in the picking warehouse were set up, as he attached barcodes and mentored new colleagues. Not long after that, Jens, a shipping and logistics clerk by training, moved up the ladder to become Department Head in Pick. At the same time, technologies and processes started changing, with tubs, containers, and the bagsorter, a huge storage and sorting machine where goods in more than 500,000 bags gondola through the logistics center, joining the mix.
In 2017, Jens became a Senior Workflow Manager, before being named Operations Manager Workflow three years later. Since then, he has been in charge of ensuring an optimal flow of goods, staff scheduling, capacity planning, and strategic decisions. It’s been more than ten years since his first day. “That’s a big chunk of my life,” Jens says. “I’m proud of what we’ve achieved. Zalando has grown, and I’m a part of that.”
Our warehouse in Mönchengladbach turned ten on August 1. We started in 2013 with 85 Zalando employees. Today, we’re a strong and diverse team of around 2,200 employees from a total of 76 nations. And we celebrated this together with our colleagues from Mönchengladbach at our summer party at the beginning of August.
Are you looking for a job with opportunities for further development? Then Zalando is the right place for you. Take a look at our current job openings here.
