Wer bist du und was machst du?

Julia Bösch, I am the founder and director Outfittery, which is a personal shopping service for men.

Worum geht’s in deiner Lehre?

Our mission is to take the pain out of shopping for men, so men who don't like to go shopping or don't have time to do that, they are provided with a personal stylist. The stylist will go shopping for them and send them personalised outfit to their home. So that's what my company is about. My job is really different every day and that's also what I love about it. A lot of about scaling the company, acquiring new customers and bringing new members to the team, so it's very different every day. I also have a lot of meetings with the teams and coordinating things, workshops that we do. Of course I also do emails and work in front of my computer, but that's more in the evening hours. It’s when the team is probably already gone and I'm still there with my cofounders until the night, that's basically when you have the time to answer emails.

Wie bist du zu dieser Lehre gekommen?

I studied business administration in Munich and I did the two semester is the abroad, one in Madrid the other one was in New York at Columbia University which was great. That's also where the idea for Outfittery comes from, because of a friend of mine who is the typical guy who doesn't like to go shopping. He hired a personal shopper to do that for him and he was so happy about it. They like a solution and the efficiency and I thought “okay this is something at some point in time I wanna make a business out,” During my studies it was clear for me that I want to fund my own company. But first I wanted to work for startup to see how it works. How do you build a big company? How do you scale it, what is important, what are the things that you shouldn't do. So I joined Rocket Internet, I went to Berlin and I worked for Zalando. I did the internationalization for Zalando. Launching the different countries, setting up the country teams, it was a very exciting times because the company was growing extremely fast and this was the perfect way and perfect place for me to learn. After two years at Zanaldo I thought that now is the time to go out and sort my own baby, and also I met my co-founder there so…

Welche Eigenschaften sollte man mitbringen?

So I don't think you have to study business to be a founder or something. I think it helps because the business study helps you to be number driven and that something that is extremely important at least for us. For example to know how we look at of the scaling of a company. Yeah that's probably the most important part. But you can also have a totally different background and do the same thing. The important thing in the end really is that you have a vision, that you're very courageous, and you believe in what you're doing. You need to hire a great team, it's a lot of that feeling to bring together the right people. That something you can study. By thinking, hiring and developing talents and developing people in the team, is really what's the most important part and also what's the most fun part of the whole thing.

Was ist das Coolste an deiner Lehre?

The coolest thing is really two things. One is our team, which is incredible. Sometimes it really brings goosebumps to me if the people, the members of our team tell me how much they love the company and love what are they doing. So the energy is really great! The other thing is our customers because were so in such a personal contact with the customer, we also get very personal feedback. So for example the stylists get a lot of flowers and chocolate because the customer is so thankful that he doesn't have to go shopping anymore and of course this is very motivating.

Was ist die größte Herausforderung?

Clearly a time restriction. So there's not a lot of room for private life, although it's kind of merging into one, so you can't really say this is my private life and this is my business life. In the end, for me it's all the same, but this is definitely the most powerful restriction

Der wichtigste Ratschlag in deinem Leben… ?

First piece of advice is to think again if I really wanna study business because I think there are studies way more interesting. The second thing is travel a lot explore the world. The third thing is, you need to push yourself to the limit every day. I think every experience that I that helped me develop was really in a situation where I pushed myself out of my comfort zone. This is just helps you to develop yourself, so this could be going to a different country for working there, this could also be an everyday situation or holding a speech in front of a lot of people. Things what you learn from.