Vaide said that on Jan. 1 Peter Sontheimer took over as product director for all three VAUDE product segments: Mountain Sports, Bike Sports and Packs ’n Bags.
The establishment of this senior position and ensuing company restructuring are important measures for strengthening the Vaude brand and part of a new brand positioning initiative, the company said.
“Our growth requires a new organizational structure,” said Vaude CEO Antje von Dewitz. “Changes in personnel for various Vaude teams are the logical next step in strengthening both brands. Product concepts, design language and innovations should be uniformly implemented throughout the brand in order to make the best use possible of the synergy arising from our diverse product segments. I’m very pleased that we were able to fill the new positions almost exclusively from our own ranks with long standing, experienced VAUDE employees.”
Both Peter Sontheimer and Carsten von Birckhahn are also taking on new key positions. Following 17 successful years as manager of Vaude Bike Sports, Sontheimer took on the position of product director for all Vaude products on Jan. 1, while von Birckhahn took over responsibility at Edelrid for products and sales.
In his previous position as senior manager, sales manager and product manager, Peter Sontheimer brought the Vaude Bike Sports division to a successful, leading position on the bike market. His years of experience in product development and the production of bike apparel, backpacks, bike bags and shoes along with his sales expertise and a thorough understanding of the Outdoor branch make him an ideal choice to fill this new position.
In the course of the restructuring measures, Gernot Moser, previously responsible for international sales of bike products, is taking over as head of the Bike Sports Sales Division. Jochen Geiger will be active as account manager for Bike Sports Germany, which includes responsibility for supervising Key German Accounts and the management of the Bike Sales Representative Teams. This passionate mountain biker and racer has been with Vaude since July 2010. Before that, he worked for many years in leading positions in the bike sports market.
Another provision of the restructuring is the consolidation at our German headquarters of our previously separate Apparel Mountain Sports and Bike Sports operating divisions. By merging these two divisions, all collection developments can now be harmonized, and it will now be possible to uniformly implement central tasks such as Collection Design and Production Planning.
In the future, the head of Apparel Division at Vaude will be Stefan Krause, who was previously responsible for the Apparel Mountain Sports division. Renate Ebi, former product manager of Bike Apparel and significantly co-responsible for the success of the Vaude Bike Apparel Collection is taking on the position head of product management Apparel which makes her team manager of all product managers in the Apparel Division. Her successor as product manager Bike Sports Apparel is Claudia Gutsche.
The Vaude Backpacks Division was has been consolidated as well. After 11 years at VAUDE, Melanie Bleicher, (formerly manager of the extremely successful Packs ‘n Bags Product Division) is now head of the Backpacks Division, now consisting of all Vaude Backpack (Mountain Sports, Bike Sports and Packs ‘n Bags) segments. With these changes, we are concurrently redirecting our focus on the backpack division’s technical development. As of 2011, Hans Thomas Langowski, who has been responsible for the design of Vaude backpacks for 20 years, will now take on the position of head of technical development, and manage the newly formed technical development team for Vaude Backpacks & Packs ‘n Bags.
