When Alexandra Szarmach joined flaconi’s management team in 2023, the company had a challenge that was easy to overlook from the outside. The online beauty retailer had grown rapidly during the pandemic. Customers were buying, the top line was moving in the right direction, and the business operated in an attractive market.
Inside the organisation, however, the picture looked rather different. Teams had grown while working remotely, successive management teams had changed direction, and people were not always clear about responsibilities or the company’s priorities. High employee turnover was coupled with a negative employee net promoter score (eNPS).
Alexandra described the situation as “beautiful chaos”. I thought that was a fitting expression. Many businesses experience something similar after a period of rapid expansion: the company becomes bigger, but the way people lead, make decisions and work together does not necessarily develop at the same pace.
In our MU Consumer & Retail Executive Call, Alexandra spoke about how flaconi approached that challenge. What interested me was the way the management team connected culture to the commercial turnaround. The company introduced a playful value house concept with competitions, colourful tracksuits and a variety of new events, such as the annual flaconi “Value Olympics”. At the same time, it became much more explicit about leadership expectations, feedback and performance.
Alexandra’s description of flaconi in 2022 will sound familiar to anyone who has worked with a fast-growing company. Different functions were pursuing different objectives. One team focused on costs, another on growth, another on brand awareness. People spent time working out whom to approach with a question, and collaboration across departments was difficult.
There was also a leadership challenge. In some cases, people had moved into management positions because they had been with the business for a long time or had strong functional expertise. That did not necessarily mean they had developed the experience required to lead a team. I would say, this is an important distinction. A growing company needs experts who can solve the immediate problem in front of them. As the organisation becomes more complex, it also needs leaders who can create clarity for others, coordinate across functions and develop people.
The new management team had a limited window to demonstrate progress. CEO Bastian Siebers focused on the commercial side, including marketing, purchasing and the platform. Alexandra concentrated on culture and leadership. In the company’s strategy house, people and mindset became the foundation on which the rest of the plan depended.
That did not mean culture was expected to solve every business issue. flaconi also worked on its commercial performance. But the management team’s view was that a handful of executives could not turn around a company of this size on their own. They needed teams that understood the direction and could execute it together.
flaconi’s answer became the Value House Concept. Employees are assigned to one of five houses, each associated with a company value. Every member of the management board serves as the house master of one value house and the houses participate in activities and events throughout the year. There is an obvious element of competition. Houses collect points and, at the end of the year, one is crowned the winner.
The Value Olympics bring people together for a day of challenges. If you have seen photographs of the flaconi leadership team in their coloured tracksuits, you will know that they are not particularly shy about the concept. What matters to me, however, is how the activities connect to what the company wants people to do. In the first year, employees could earn points by attending training, engaging with company dashboards or taking part in sessions about business performance. Under the value “Living Data”, the idea was to encourage people to understand the numbers and use them in their decisions.
That is a useful way to think about gamification. It can make participation more engaging, but it needs a purpose beyond collecting points. If a company wants people to learn, collaborate across functions or take more interest in business performance, the activities should encourage precisely that. The same logic applies to events. Bringing colleagues together has value in itself, especially in an organisation that grew remotely. But a company should also be clear about what these interactions are meant to support.
At flaconi, Alexandra’s argument is that stronger relationships make collaboration easier and give people a greater sense of responsibility towards one another. The values also appear in more formal parts of the employee journey. According to Alexandra, they are considered in interviews, performance conversations and promotion discussions. New employees receive a value onboarding in their first week, led by one of the CxOs.
One of the most useful parts of our conversation was Alexandra’s openness about what flaconi had changed along the way. In the first year, the company put considerable energy into the programme to ensure the launch is successful. There were frequent activities, events and communications, as well as a substantial amount of manual work to track points. Alexandra also noticed that some employees were becoming more interested in collecting points than in the intention behind them.
That should not be surprising. If you create a competitive system, people will try to win. The question for management is whether winning the game still supports the behaviour the organisation wants to encourage. Ultimately, this realization fostered an open mindset toward adapting the concept when needed.
After the values and culture became visible and well-established, flaconi reduced the number of ongoing activities. In the third year, the company focused on five larger events rather than maintaining a continuous stream of smaller opportunities to collect points. Each event remains connected to a value, but the programme has become simpler to run and easier to integrate into the working year. I think there is a broader lesson here. Culture initiatives often start with considerable enthusiasm, followed by a growing calendar of activities that require time from employees and HR. At some point, the effort needed to maintain the programme can become disproportionate to its effect. flaconi’s willingness to scale it back is as interesting as its decision to launch it.
Alexandra also explained that the programme did not work in exactly the same way in the logistics operation as it did in the Berlin office. The company had to adapt activities to a different working environment and to the realities of shift work. The underlying values stayed the same, but the way people engaged with them changed.
The most revealing part of our discussion came when we talked about leaders who deliver strong commercial results but do not live the company’s values. Most executives will recognise the dilemma. Someone achieves their targets, maintains important relationships or produces results that are difficult to replace. At the same time, their behaviour creates problems for the team. The temptation is to tolerate it because the business contribution is so visible.
Alexandra’s answer was direct: flaconi assesses business impact alongside cultural and leadership impact, and the company expects its leaders to deliver on both. She described a recent case in which the business had separated from a leader who had produced strong results but did not meet its cultural expectations.
That was not presented as an immediate decision. Alexandra explained that the company had spent time trying to help the individual adapt. Ultimately, however, the leadership team concluded that the situation could not continue.
I found this significant because employees pay close attention to who is rewarded, promoted and protected. A management team can talk convincingly about its values and make a visible effort to bring people together. If it then makes an exception for a leader because that person delivers the numbers, employees will draw their own conclusions about what really matters. The decision does not make culture easy to manage. Judging leadership behaviour is more complex than looking at a sales target, and organisations need to be fair and specific about what they expect. But it does require a willingness to accept that strong individual results do not cancel out the consequences of how those results are achieved.
Towards the end of the call, Alexandra made another point that I would not want to lose among the colourful photographs and stories about the Value Olympics. She described the earlier flaconi culture as one in which people sometimes avoided difficult feedback because they wanted to be liked. The management team worked to become more explicit about performance, constructive feedback and the connection between results, salary increases and promotions.
Her argument is pragmatic: business performance pays for jobs, development and the experiences a company can offer its employees. A positive working environment should therefore include honest conversations about what people contribute and where they need to improve. flaconi’s reported development is encouraging: The eNPS moved from minus 16 in 2022 to 40 in 2026. Alexandra stressed that the business achieved a positive EBITDA in the first year after the management change and has continued to grow profitably. She also described a substantial reduction in employee turnover.
We should be careful about treating those developments as proof that one initiative caused the turnaround. Of course, the management team made commercial changes alongside its work on culture and leadership. What the story does show is that flaconi treated these elements as connected parts of the same challenge.
For me, that is what makes the case relevant beyond the individual example. flaconi found a way to make its values visible and engaging, then connected them to the behaviours and decisions it expected from its people. The format will look different elsewhere. A logistics team, a food manufacturer or a fashion business may need different activities and a different tone.
So, while the style may differ, the management discipline is transferable: understand what the organisation needs to achieve, make the desired behaviours tangible, and be prepared to apply the same expectations when the decision becomes uncomfortable.