We have stumbled now, but the company is still healthy and I guarantee that we will be here in a year or five, says the head of Dedoles – Denník N

Dedoles owner Jaroslav Chrapko explains why they had to fire two hundred people in the company. While on the one hand the growth plan was too ambitious, on the other the market turned upside down. Chrapko reminds us that in the jargon of e-commerce it is also called “covid bump”. When the stone shops were closed for 4 months, it was, of course, selling well on the web. “Maybe we naively thought it would stay that way, unless our market was unnaturally inflated,” Chrapko describes one of the reasons why the company planned sales of 150 million euros for this year. According to him, a more ambitious plan would still be okay if the company had external capital. Now he is looking for it and thinks that if he had thought about it before, he could have avoided today’s problem. However, according to him, the company is still healthy, it just needs more time to sell too high stocks. “We tried something that was essentially unprecedented in this market. We got a good business lesson, “says Jaroslav Chrapko and explains in the interview: whether advertising with hamsters works in Germany, for example, why they are now expanding to Amazon or Zalando, why they are not so afraid of too many competitors with cheerful socks, what is happened to Facebook and what he would do differently today. The index says you are firing about 200 people. It fits? Roughly those numbers are sitting, but it’s not in one month, but since the beginning of January. So far, you have had at most about 900 people? Yes, but this number was inflated by seasonal workers who had temporary contracts. Many of them were people who worked in the warehouse and whose contracts ended on January 31, or worked on projects that ended at that time, or they were people from customer support and they also had temporary contracts. So in that number, 900, there were also time-limited contracts that we would extend if we saw higher demand. Jaroslav Chrapko. Photo – Dedoles / Miro NôtaWhy is this happening? Our growth plans have not materialized. For this year, we originally planned to grow into sales of 150 to 180 million euros. Today we see that you need at least a standard subscription to read. Are you a subscriber?