Now reading: Words from our CEO — 5 years recap
Words from our CEO — 5 years recap
noo.ma is turning five! That made me reflect a little, looking back at the unbelievable last 5 years and also looking into the future for what comes next.
When we started noo.ma with Cyprian in Nov 2017, to be honest we didn’t know what to expect. None of us had any experience in the design or e-comm industry whatsoever. Every task was totally new and the learning curve was just crazy. We started off as two friends trying to build something fresh and bold, with high hopes of what noo.ma can become. The purpose was always simple - create a global, sustainable, affordable, D2C design brand with amazing products for every part of your home.
At the start of our journey we were product designers, front-end developers, marketers, salesmen, truck drivers, packaging guys, all in one :) Of course working 16h a day can be tiring, but if you love it, you appreciate the results and how much knowledge you’re gaining at the time.
Over time we’ve learned to work smarter, we’ve extremely improved every part of what we do. This is 100% thanks to our amazing team - people that as much as me and Cyprian do, create noo.ma everyday and made it the way it is today. Right people joining the ship at a perfect time is what made the journey for noo.ma possible.
5 years later we’re a team of 40 amazing people and delivered our products to over 40k customers in 40 countries. We’ve come from a room in an apartment on the 4th floor, to a state of the art, modern warehouse and a 500m2 office in the city center, moving 4 times along the way. That’s exciting! I also like to think we’ve made our contribution to the positive industry change starting to build up, and it’s great to see new, small brands now following the same path.
We’re constantly working on limiting and offsetting our negative impact on the environment. A big part of that is the fact that all of our products are made locally, here in the Europe, and over 98% in Poland. This is only possible thanks to a vast range of manufactures responsible for making all of noo.ma’s products. I’m grateful for their collaboration and sharing their skills and knowledge.
I also realize that, as always, along the way sometimes not everything went perfectly, and that there are times when we failed. We take responsibility for all of these cases, we learned from them and we work hard to make sure that in the future we will minimize any errors.
What’s next? We all realize that these are challenging macro economic times, and some of well-established brands and businesses in our industry are having a hard time or have already gone bust. How we manage to develop during the recession is a key factor of what noo.ma will become in the future. We stay on the same path as 5 years ago, have a clear objective and will do everything in our power to help them succeed. We’re super excited about next year, with massive turning points coming up, such as our own first physical store in Berlin and expanding to the US.
Last, but not least: huge shout-out to all noo.ma team members for your everyday amazing work and doing your best, together building noo.ma. Huge thank you to all of our customers for your trust, for letting us into your homes and enabling us to do what we love. We promise to give you even more amazing products in the future!
Damian Goliński
Co-founder & CEO of noo.ma