Magda joined Everli back in summer 2020 as the marketing manager for Poland and she’s here to share her experience with us; from the insatiable hunger for customer motivation that drove her into online marketing, as well as her favourite Everli surprises, and the delightful reason why the humble jacket is more significant than you think.

How did your career journey to Everli take shape?

I started my career in the advertising industry, working firstly as an account executive for a big advertising agency. But, mostly due to my education in Sociology, I was more interested in the strategic elements of the ads we created, so I switched to the marketing strategy department. Even then, there was still so much information missing. After you created the ad, you didn’t get much feedback from the clients so I was always left wondering what the effect had been and if it actually was a good campaign.

This drove me to move to a job on the client side of the marketing industry, where I worked for an established beer brand in Poland. I got the information I wanted in terms of exactly how different types of campaigns affect the business, but this was a product that was sold offline, so I eventually started getting hungry for even more information. When you sell offline, you don’t have any direct link between the actual ad and the purchase, so you don’t know if they bought your product because of the price, the packaging, the advertising, etc. 

So, after working for six years in the beer business where I went from Brand Manager to Marketing Director, I finally ended up at Everli – and it’s because I needed to know more! Although I had advertised online, I knew nothing about digital marketing in the ecommerce business, and it was exciting to be able to see the actual effect of a campaign and be able to fully measure it, or quickly revise it if need be.

For me, marketing is not only about building a brand or spending money to get people to remember your brand. It’s also about knowing the behaviour of your audience. It’s about getting a good balance between what the tried and tested data tells you and experimental with creative, bold, and new ideas that don’t have any data yet.

What has it been like working for Everli? Any surprises?

Yes! It’s completely different from what I expected because the company that I worked for previously was a very big, private company. It was founded in the early 90s and the company culture reflected that, not only because we didn’t have many of the online tools to help us in our day-to-day tasks, but also that the level of trust was completely different than it is in Everli. That’s what surprised me the most, and also what made me really like this company. 

The recruitment process at Everli was quite tough, and at first I didn’t understand why, but then I realised there was a method in the madness: If you recruit people who are truly in line with the company values then you can give them more trust and ownership. This allows you to build a group of people that really work well together.

Another surprise was how well organised it was. As a start-up you expect chaos, nothing in place, such as HR processes, etc. But it turns out that, in fact, the processes in Everli are even better than in the big international advertising agency that I had worked for. Better because they are flexible and have been adjusted to what the employees want. 

A great example of this is the remote-first approach which was created with full input from the employees. There is also constant communication from HR, useful communication, not just another email that you read, close and forget. The transparency of the communication was also a surprise, so different to other companies where everything seems to be super secret. Then, when you have a job to do, it’s ten times harder because you can’t get the information you need to do it.

Don’t get me wrong, Everli has its moments of chaos too, but at its core, the culture here is strong, trusting, and surprisingly established for a set-up.

How do you see the future of online grocery shopping?

I’m a hard user of online grocery shopping and have been for around 8 years, so I really do believe in what this company does. It’s another thing that makes me enjoy this job, because if you do something that you believe in, especially if you’re a marketer who is selling things to people, it really makes a difference. I know many people who work in marketing who share this feeling, they wake up in the morning wondering if what they do is in line with their ethics. 

Working at Everli, however, I really do feel like we are creating something that makes people’s lives easier, and we don’t bullshit them. I also believe in our service because I personally hate going to the grocery store, if I could I would never go again! I foresee steady growth and development for online grocery shopping because I think there are a lot of people out there who also hate it but still do it, and so we still have space to grow.

What has been your standout experience from your time Everli?

The first thing is probably the TV campaign that we prepared in 3 and half months last year. It was a crazy intensive experience that was happening remotely and it was the first time that I had taken part in the process of producing videos fully remotely. Not being on set during the shoot, not taking part physically was different, but I really enjoyed the long, late evening discussions about things like if that one line of saxophone is good or bad. And we were doing all of this by whatsapp with the agency based in the UK, the production company and sets in Spain, some people in Italy, some in Poland; it was a crazy time, but so much fun. I really, really enjoyed it!

My other favourite experience was the opportunity to meet everybody for the first time in Montepulciano after over a year of working remotely. Seeing everyone live in person was really great because they were even better in the flesh! It was funny because there were people who turned out to be half a metre taller or shorter than I thought.

There are small things you don’t think about when working remotely, like you don’t know what anyone’s jacket looks like. So when we were outside with our jackets and masks on, half a metre taller/shorter than expected, the people I had been working with regularly were suddenly unrecognisable. It’s another dimension to the relationship that you don’t think about and it was nice to know what everyone’s jackets looked like!

If you’d like to be part of the Everli adventure, check out our latest vacancies here.