Otrium is the online fashion marketplace for outlet fashion. The company sells premium brands such as G-Star, Reiss, and Scotch & Soda. It offers discounts that cannot be found anywhere else.

Milan Daniels and Max Klijnstra founded Otrium in 2015 to stir up the fashion industry. They wanted to challenge the industry’s problem of excess inventory.

Otrium launched at an ideal time. The world was ready for this type of sustainable marketplace proposition. In addition, COVID-19 accelerated e-commerce adoption. As a result, Otrium grew quickly. In 2021, Deloitte awarded the company the Fast50 award as the fastest-growing technology company in the Netherlands.

The challenge: keeping up with lightning speed growth

Otrium grew extremely fast. After starting in the Netherlands, the company quickly expanded to the UK, Germany, France, and the United States. As Otrium became larger, the existing team could no longer manage everything through informal structures. In addition, the company struggled to keep up with the hiring pace needed to reach its growth ambitions.

After the €24 million Series B fundraising, Head of Commercial Strategy Thijs Algra asked Thijmen Kaster to join. His role was to set up the sales operations function.

The outcome: professionalized sales, VC fundraising and investor reporting

Initially, Thijmen joined Otrium as interim manager to structure sales processes. During his first three months, he professionalized the CRM system. He also implemented processes to measure sales team performance. In addition, he built a dashboard to track results and created a new compensation model for sales representatives.

Next to that, he supported the €100 million Series C funding round. This was the largest fundraising round in the Netherlands so far. He also led the preparation of quarterly investor reporting meetings. On top of that, Thijmen led Black Friday as strategic project manager. Later, he became interim country manager for Germany.

How working for Otrium led to starting Sweav

When Otrium hired its new VP of Growth, Sakshi Anand, Thijmen started looking in his own network. He wanted to find more independent project managers who could strengthen the growth team. As it turned out, like-minded interim managers were also very keen to join Otrium.

Nout Knabben, formerly at Strategy&, joined as interim manager for the B2B Marketplace. In addition, Marieke Berendsen, formerly at SparkOptimus, joined as all-round project manager for the growth team.

This led to the idea of Sweav. The goal was to connect freelance top consultants with ambitious, fast-growing companies such as Otrium. Partly because of Otrium’s confidence, Sweav built a community of more than 150 independent strategy and M&A consultants two years later.

Sweav can help scale-ups such as Otrium during lightning-speed growth. Are you a fast-growing, ambitious company? Are you looking for smart, independent consultants who can support your growth? Find out how we can help you.