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Jan Cortenbach

Commercieel en digitale strateeg
  • Suggested rate
    €1,200 / day
  • Experience8-15 years
  • Response rate100%
  • Response time1 hour
The project will begin once you accept Jan's quote.
Location and workplace preferences
Location
Rotterdam, Nederland
Can work onsite in your office in
  • and around Rotterdam (up to 50km)
  • and around Amsterdam (up to 10km)
  • and around Utrecht (up to 10km)
  • and around Den Haag (up to 10km)
  • and around Leiden (up to 10km)
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Languages
Categories
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Skill set
Jan in a few words
38 year-old with a back-ground in strategy consulting and board-level experience, formulating and executing strategies on the interface of commercial an digital/tech including large organizational transformations. This experience perfectly combines my intrinsic fascination for technology with my entrepreneurial mindset to deliver results.

My former responsibilities range from growing e-commerce businesses through successful webshop and Amazon strategies, rationalizing mis-managed digital organizations, coordinating the delivery of technically extremely complex projects as well as leading an organizational restructuring of a 2k+ FTE company.

In summary: I am an entrepreneurial result-hungry tech-geek, who is able to deliver on a broad scope of topics. My personality has been described as analytical and result-driven (and oh yeah, fun!).

I am open to both freelance work as well as long-term commitments.

On a personal level: I live in Schiedam with my wife Florien, two sons Otto (3 years) and Boris (0 years), and dog Archie.
Experience
  • ECOstyle (a Vendis Capital portfolio company)
    Digital Director
    July 2023 - June 2024 (11 months)
    Rotterdam, Netherlands
    Per request of Vendis, I joined EUROstyle (known from garden brands ECOstyle & johnandco.com and petfood brand Vitalstyle) with the mission to re-evaluate the struggling e-commerce business. During this past year I have substantially reevaluated the strategy, resulting in:
    - A new strategy and budget, with a more realistic but conservative outlook on the upcoming 3 years.
    - Complete migration of 4 websites to cheaper and easier to manage Shopify, as the existing platform was unmanageable due to complexity and cost. Additionally, this resulted in an instant cost-saving of €100k in annual licensing cost.
    - Overperformance on this budget, and our first year with a positive contribution margin, by:
    - Gaining control over marketing spend by introducing new KPIs and steering on them (e.g. contribution margin per channel had not been measured before) and by making changes to the team resulting in a high-performance organization.
    - Focusing on webshop instead of Amazon sales, as our outlook for Amazon was negative for the foreseeable future.
    - Centralizing customer service in an existing team at our head office.
    - A new online direct-to-consumer brand in the Netherlands: johnandco.com, with the objective of growing without restrictions arising from channel conflicts on our more established brands.
    - A strong team that is able to implement the strategy for the upcoming years independent of the leadership of a dedicated Digital Director.

    After having formulated a more conservative financial outlook for the upcoming years, I decided that director-level leadership was not in the organization’s best financial interest and left the company in the capable heads of the new team.
  • Alpine Hearing Protection (a Vendis Capital portfolio company)
    E-commerce Director
    E-COMMERCE
    June 2021 - July 2023 (2 years and 1 month)
    Soest, Nederland
    I joined Alpine when its e-commerce business was kicking off and director-level management was needed. During that time i successfully led the transition of a traditional consumer goods company into an e-commerce company which primarily focuses on direct-to-consumer sales. During the two years I worked at Alpine:
    - I led the growth of our marketplace (mainly Amazon US and EU) revenue by 500% (from €5M to €25M) and our webshops by 240% (from €1.3M to €3.1M) with a 25% contribution margin to our EBITDA.
    - I built a strong, winning, consisting of high-performance players with a mindset for profitable growth and managed this team by building better analytics, defining KPIs and tracking them as well as improved ways of working.
    - I implemented a future-proof technical infrastructure, by migrating 5 webshops to a new Shopify environment and building new data warehousing and reporting.
  • Charlie Temple
    E-commerce Director
    E-COMMERCE
    January 2019 - May 2021 (2 years and 4 months)
    Rotterdam, Netherlands
    In this role I was responsible for Charlie Temple’s commercial results. My team consisted of 13 FTE. Notable achievements:
    - I built an effective and efficient team (from 5 FTE to 13 FTE) by hiring experienced team members, in-sourcing from agencies and implementing processes and ways of working focused on clear communication, result-focus and alignment between work and strategy (based on agile, scrum, OKR methodology).
    - I brought marketing spend under control (from 50+% to 27% of revenue) by introducing new steering for performance marketing, in-sourcing from agencies as well as smarter budgeting for TV advertising.
    - I Brought unsatisfactory website development under control by building an in-house development team moving to a new architecture.
Recommendations
Education
  • Msc, Applied Physics
    Eindhoven University of Technology
    2012
    Msc, Applied Physics
  • Bsc, Applied Physics
    Eindhoven University of Technology
    2011
    Bsc, Applied Physics
  • Certificate of Technical Management, Faculty of Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences
    Eindhoven University of Technology
    2009
    Certificate of Technical Management, Faculty of Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences