Daniel Walder: For me it actually came naturally. As a little boy, I wrote in my friends’ books that I was going to be a shoe director, while others wanted to be a police officer or an astronaut. Shoe director was my father’s title, who was still allowed to carry the title through the factory. And that seemed to make an impression on me. Also that we grew up next to the headquarters or visited the stores with our parents. We just grew up in a shoebox. In 2014 I became managing director. We are a management team of four, my sisters represent purchasing, one for women’s and men’s shoes, the other for children’s shoes. Then with Sven Gerspacher we have someone who combines all accounting, controlling and IT.
Was it clear to you and your sisters who would take over the management?
Yes. And by the way, it wasn’t the case that I said I was the oldest and that the oldest, or even worse, the male part, was given the management role. My sisters have expressly said that they will only get involved in management positions here if they can stay in purchasing. And so we divided it up.
How confident are you about the future regarding personnel issues?
I’m glad that we have the fluctuation under control quite well. We have also changed our systems somewhat and created new incentives. These include an additional holiday on birthdays and more digitalization. We used to inform staff via magazines and emails, but today we actually do everything via apps. And we work a lot with images and videos, so we can reach people outside better. This has to do with the hemispheres of the brain: the creative hemisphere is of course more active, especially in the creative jobs outside; these people respond better to images and video messages rather than long texts. At the beginning of 2023 we also introduced the you culture, which we consistently enforce. Nevertheless, there is a shortage of skilled workers and we don’t have much choice when we advertise a new position. But we always manage to find good people. We are already working on the company succession, even if it still takes a while: the oldest member of the seventh generation is twelve years old. From the fifth to the sixth generation everything went smoothly, and it was very easy to organize. But that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case next time.
Until Corona, you ran franchises with various brand partners for years. Why was it closed?
That had nothing to do with the pandemic. In 2004 we joined Geox. That was brilliant at the time and exactly the right moment. In a short space of time we had a lot of 40 sqm shops that made 2 million in sales per year. So the productivity per square meter was incredible. We then continued with Ecco, and later a few Gabor stores were added, some of which replaced the Geox locations. Back then, people still thought: The multi-brand business will die at some point. But then that changed. And the monobrand stores suddenly stopped working. We then said to ourselves that we would stop doing that and concentrate fully on multi-brand. Many businesses closed because they were too small to take over. And I need at least 150 square meters for the Walder Store, we prefer 200 to 250 square meters.