I'm not a philosopher.
I make things happen.
At four, I built a wall in the basement of my parents' new house.
Nobody asked me to. It got me into a lot of trouble.
But it never stopped: Lego, model trains, bonsai, the garden.
I have always wanted to build things.
At 15, I wanted to study art. I painted a lot. Shortly before my final
school exams, I talked to my uncle, a stained-glass artist. He told me
how hard that life can be. I come from a simple home, and that
wasn't the life I wanted.
So I looked for a way to be creative and still earn a living. It was 1983.
Karl Lagerfeld, Jil Sander and Wolfgang Joop were big names in
Germany. Fashion, I thought. Creative, and clearly people make
money with it. I'll be a fashion designer.
One problem: I had no portfolio. First came military service.
To study, I needed a three-month internship, and those were hard
to get. So I decided to do a tailoring apprenticeship first. Even that
wasn't easy, because my generation was huge and everyone was looking for a place. In the end, I found one in a small men's tailor shop on the Mosel.
That's where it happened. I fell in love with making things. Not just designing them, but building them with my own hands. I sewed every weekend. Every Saturday night at the disco, I wore something new: a shirt, a pair of trousers. People noticed.
I never went to fashion school. I stayed a tailor, worked as a journeyman, and in January 1990 passed my master tailor exam with the best result in Germany, with a suit I made for my father. A year later, at a big ceremony for the best young master craftsmen of all trades, the Federal Minister of Labour, Norbert Blüm, handed me my certificate.
Then came industry. I didn't stop being creative there. In a factory you can be creative at scale: not one suit for one person, but clothes for thousands. Later I learned that leading people is creative work too. Designing an organisation, a department or a workflow is the same craft, just with different material. That took me into top management, to IMD in Lausanne, and in 2015 to Izmir, where I ran the HUGO BOSS factory with 4,100 people for five years. In January 2021, I started my own consulting firm.
Looking back, it has always been the same thing: an idea, and then the work of making it real. Something you can touch. Something where you can see the difference.
That's what I bring to every factory I work with.
