Dusseldorf The pen manufacturer Edding, founded in 1960, is breaking new ground with a social innovation: This Tuesday, the first board of directors of a listed group will start work at the family company from Ahrensburg. Fränzi Kühne and Boontham Temaismithi, co-founders of Germany’s first digital agency Torben, Lucie and the Yellow Danger (TLGG), will share the position of Chief Digital Officer in the future.
“We wanted to be pioneers,” says CEO Per Ledermann in an interview with the Handelsblatt. “We benefit when we lead the way.” Currently, there are almost 20 percent part-time jobs at Edding worldwide, and there are a little more in Germany. But how did it come about that the two digital experts are now managing a medium-sized company?
Edding is known for its thick markers, which have made so many flipcharts colorful. They stand for creativity, joint reflection, productive conversations – everything that was sorely missed in the pandemic. This describes the challenge Ledermann faces with its more than 700 employees. How do you transform the company into a digital future that may no longer need thick, squeaky pens?
In view of the Ukraine crisis, the company boss also had to slightly lower the forecast for 2022 on Monday and announce preliminary business figures. According to this, Edding turned over almost 149 million euros in 2021 and generated a profit of almost seven million euros.
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“The task is big,” says Fränzi Kühne. The challenge is to “relocate creativity and service to the digital space”. But the post is about more for all three, explains the 38-year-old. “In the future, our joint decisions will include two points of view and thus always enable a diverse perspective.” This is particularly important in the transformation phase.
Kühne was Germany’s youngest member of the supervisory board
Boontham Temaismithi believes that Edding’s transformation must go hand in hand with that of the creative industries. “In order to achieve this, we will have to rethink small and medium-sized companies a good deal and be more digital,” explains the 50-year-old. In any case, he sees the corporate culture and the sustainability obligations at Edding as going in the right direction. Now both want to help shape the future of the company.
Since the summer of 2021, the Management Positions Act II has been newly regulated as part of the #Stayonboard initiative. According to this, board members of stock corporations, SE directors and GmbH managing directors will in future be entitled to family-related and liability-free time off. With the first board of directors of a listed company, a new idea has now emerged.
Kühne met Ledermann a year and a half ago when he set out to bring digital expertise into the company. “Family companies have already hooked me at TLGG,” she says. “They are about generations and not just about profit, that was different with the Dax companies.” The two then stayed in contact.
The job at Edding is “very exciting,” says Kühne, who has already done some exciting things in her life. She founded TLGG 14 years ago together with Christoph Bornschein and Boontham Temaismithi. The company hit the nerve of the time, the clients were prominent with BMW, Lufthansa, Eon, the growth was rapid and the founders were people in demand.
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In 2017, Kühne became the country’s youngest member of the supervisory board at Freenet. In 2015, the founders sold the agency to the US communications group Omnicom. In 2019, Kühne and Temaismithi left. Kühne had a second child and wrote a “Spiegel” bestseller. A board position in tandem is what fits well into her life.
Kühne has been in favor of various teams for years. But she doesn’t understand “that so many companies don’t have that on their screens,” she says. Temaismithi and she now embodied diversity in a shared role at Edding.
In any case, CEO Ledermann, 46, is convinced of the idea of the board tandem. He has been at the helm of the company for twelve years. His family holds 100 percent of the ordinary shares, the preferred shares are traded on the Frankfurt and Hamburg stock exchanges.
Board standing as an innovation in the organization
The application process for the position of head of digital took a good year and a half. In the end, there were four possible candidates for Ledermann, two of whom were tandems. The supervisory board decided in favor of the mixed doubles and thus put Edding in a pioneering position. Now everyone has to deliver. But Ledermann doesn’t worry about that, he thinks: “Without the possibility of failure, there are no innovations.”
The two new co-digital bosses could probably have started anywhere. Kühne is already investing in start-ups, while Temaismithi takes care of agencies and young companies that want to strengthen social cohesion with new business ideas. But a WhatsApp from Kühne was enough for Temaismithi to take a closer look at the company.
Both have worked together for a long time; in the future they will share a job and also one of their two new e-mail addresses. Employees can choose whether they want to contact both or just one of them. Since they are breaking new ground, it is not yet entirely clear how exactly they will split up. However, both will not be available for Edding five days a week.
Of course, the two founders know a lot about digital talent. Edding could benefit from this, but also the employees who would be confronted with a different mindset. In any case, Kühne brings a lot of experience with her, which she also processed in her book. “What men are never asked. I’ll ask anyway,” is the title. Among other things, it is about the fact that women are often asked about their appearance and evaluated – and men are not.
In the joint conversation with the Handelsblatt it is different that day. Because: Edding entered the tattoo ink business in 2020. It is still a small line of business with production in Bautzen. And Per Ledermann readily provides information when asked whether he is satisfied with his tattoos. At least at Edding, the times when men weren’t asked about their appearance are over.
More: “You can also learn good things from men,” says Fränzi Kühne