Biography

The full career story behind the work I do now — Zalando, Beiersdorf, Britvic, and the track record I bring to coaching, advisory, and board work.

Zalando

Most recently, I was SVP People Solutions for Zalando, one of Europe's largest DAX-listed companies — leading a team of 250+ across business partnering, centres of excellence, workforce transformation and change management, partnering directly with the Management Board and Executive Team on strategy, performance and leadership, and acting as a senior coach at the most senior level. It's the chapter I most want people to know about: driving major workforce change in a fast-moving tech and e-commerce business, embracing the potential of AI for the workforce, and designing organisations and capabilities fit for that pace.

I led the people side of major M&A — including the integration of 1,200 people after the acquisition of About You — partnered on €100m of logistics savings alongside a shift to AI and automation, and built the trust with works councils and unions needed to land restructuring inside one of Europe's most tightly regulated employment systems.

Beiersdorf

My time at Beiersdorf started by running one of the company's largest affiliates operationally — as HR Director for Northern Europe (UK, Ireland, Netherlands and the Nordics), sitting on the affiliate's board of directors and shaping HR strategy alongside the General Manager and regional leadership team.

From there, the work I'm proudest of was building, not just advising. I took the Pharmacy & Selective Brands division from a small, non-dedicated team to a dedicated team of almost a thousand people, and led the restructuring that helped the Eucerin brand grow from €500m to €1bn in sales, two years ahead of target.

Working directly for the CEO, I also co-led "Shaping our Next Normal" (SONN), the strategic project that reshaped Beiersdorf's entire innovation process end to end — building in a dedicated focus on short, medium and long-term innovation and grounding it far more deeply in consumer insight, so new products moved from idea to shelf faster. Alongside that, I co-designed Beiersdorf's first global Diversity & Inclusion strategy — I'd already moved on to Zalando before it fully landed, but stayed close enough to see it reach 50/50 gender parity in leadership two years ahead of target. None of that happens from the sidelines.

Britvic

Before Beiersdorf, I spent six years at Britvic Soft Drinks — one of the UK's largest soft drinks manufacturers and the licence holder for Pepsi in the UK, part of the Carlsberg Group. It's where I first built HR from scratch in new markets rather than inheriting it in established ones: I set up new business units across the USA, Asia, Europe and India, then went on to lead the growth of local talent and operations across 11 markets outside the UK and Ireland, including M&A projects in Brazil and Eastern Europe and new HQs in the USA and Asia. It was hands-on, international, high-growth work — the kind that teaches you what it takes to build a function, not just run one.

Building high-performing teams

Team building shows up in the numbers, not just the philosophy. At Zalando, I redesigned the business partnering organisation from an operational service into a strategic advisory function — better capability and more automation let us reduce headcount from 85 to 62, while employee engagement scores rose from 58% to 83%. At Beiersdorf, leading HR for Northern Europe, I secured €2m of board investment for a new three-year HR strategy, with new organisational design and career initiatives that lifted employee engagement by 45% across nine countries.

Governance & board experience

I've held statutory board seats — the legally required boards of a company's country entities, distinct from a group's main Supervisory Board — at Beiersdorf, in the UK and Northern Europe, and at Zalando, in China. Across my VP and SVP mandates I've taken major workforce transformation programs to supervisory board level for approval — multi-million euro cost reduction programmes and the shift to AI across functions like Customer Care, Content Solutions and Group Operations. That's the governance experience, and the ability to get a board to back genuinely transformational change, that I now bring to a supervisory board or NED table.

Credentials

Advanced Practitioner Diploma in Executive Coaching (AOEC, ICF accredited) · Hogan Certified Coach.

None of this is theory to me anymore. I'm not coaching from a case study — I'm coaching from inside my own leap, right now, with the fear still fresh rather than safely resolved and retold. Twenty-five years of leading other people through change taught me the mechanics of it; leaving Zalando to build this practice is teaching me what it actually feels like. That combination is what I bring into every room now.